From: bongo@splash.Princeton.EDU (Ameet A. Ravel)
Subject: TECH: Help with choosing visualization hardware/software
Date: 24 Aug 92 18:12:40 GMT
Message-ID: <1992Aug24.181240.17041@Princeton.EDU>
Organization: Princeton University


Crossposted from comp.graphics.visualization


In article <1992Aug22.015329.4718@cs.tulane.edu>
makrisna@convex1.tcs.tulane.edu (Krishna Achuta Rao) writes:

>     1. What hardware do you use? PC/mac/mainframe/workstation and as many
>        specs. as you consider important.

At the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, we use graphics
workstations almost exclusively: Sun's, Sparcstations, and Silicon
Graphics Irises.

>     2. What software do you use? (eg. NCAR graphics) What Operating system
>        does it run on? Is it public domain/free? If it is commercial software

Much of our imaging involves contour plots of geophysical data.  Thus,
a package that can handle contouring and color shading with map
backgrounds is essential.  We use NCAR graphics, and also a
public-domain package called GMT:

    GMT [by Paul Wessel and Walter Smith] is a public domain software
    package that can be used to manipulate and display 2-dimensional
    (time-series or [x,y] series) or 3-dimensional data sets ([x,y,z]
    grids).  The processing and display routines within GMT are
    completely general and will handle any [x,y] or [x,y,z] data as
    input.

    GMT is written in highly portable C to be used with any hardware
    running UNIX and follows the modular design philosophy.  All
    output is in Postscript.

You can get GMT via anonymous ftp from kiawe.soest.hawaii.edu
(128.171.151.16) in the pub/gmt directory.

>     3. What are your comments on the software you use? What do you feel are
>        the strong/weak points of what you use?

I would recommend GMT over NCAR.  Both have their own strong points,
but GMT is, IMHO, better designed for the modern networked, Unix and
PostScript based computing environments.  NCAR is written and relies
on the somewhat outdated Fortran-77 conventions.

Ameet A. Raval                   Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory
email: bongo@splash.princeton.edu                Princeton, N.J. 08542
disclaimer: Mine, they're mine, I tell you!        phone: 609-452-6563