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Agricultural Engineering Opens New Undergraduate Workstation Laboratory

Sun Microsystems, Inc. along with AutoDesk, Inc. have teamed up to donate hardware and software to the Agricultural Engineering Department at Purdue for the development of an Undergraduate Workstation Laboratory. Sun has donated a Sun 4/390 Sparcserver and AutoDesk has donated grant copies of AutoCad Rel. 10 licensed to run on eight color Sun 4/60 Sparcstations located in AGEN room 105. The popularity of Sun workstations and the use of AutoCad in several of the Ag. Engineering courses has created a demand for a larger, more complete workstation lab environment.

The workstation lab is ready for all AGEN students to use this spring semester. The large color displays will make using AutoCad more enjoyable and the 12.5 MIPS Sparc CPU in each diskless Sparcstation will make the programs fly. The Sparcstations will also be used to display color output from programs such as the finite element ANSYS, and the Geographical Resources Analysis Support System GRASS.

A total of twelve new Sun 4/60 Sparcstations will be served by the new Sun 4/390 named "pasture". Pasture will join our existing Sun 4/280 file server "stable" and her thirteen Sun 3 clients to provide a total of 25 diskless workstations for use by faculty, staff and students. Both the Sun 4/390 and Sun 4/60 computers are the latest models produced by Sun.

Oh by the way, pasture's new clients were named after different crops found in a pasture, such as: alfalfa, barley, bluegrass, clover, fescue, foxtail, legume, maize, oats, redtop, rye, wheat. They go along with stable's clients: appaloosa, arabian, barb, belgian, clydesdale, hackney, morgan, palomino, percheron, pinto, shetland, shire, welsh.

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