At present PREPI is only available for the
SILICON GRAPHICS WORKSTATIONS
PREPI should quite happily run on ANY SG machine under Irix 4 and
above. I WOULD STRONGLY RECOMMED THAT YOU UPGRADE TO 5.1 OR ABOVE
as Irix 4 has now become somewhat outdated. The storage requirements
for PREPI are 5-10 MB (depending upon which additional programs you install).
A number of people have asked me to recommend minimum configuarations which
will support PREPI. We have run PREPI on a range of SG platforms, including
the basic Indy platforms (approx $5000 machines), without any problems. Simple
line (vector) display is pretty fast on the low end Indy's but the
time when you wish you had spent a little more on your system is when you begin to
display solid lighted objects e.g. ribbons, bonds as cylinders
(as is often required for slide/movie making) for LARGE protein structures.
The graphics performance can then become painfully slow.
Having
said that, for very large structures, interactive manipulation can always be done in low level
line (vector) mode with the complex lighted surfaces being displayed in the final frame .
If you can afford to extend the entry level systems, then aim for:
- 24 BIT COLOUR
This means that simple screen captures are good enough for slide
production and publication (24 BIT = millions of colours)
- HARDWARE Z-BUFFERING / GR3-XZ GRAPHICS BOARDS
Worth every penny it if you can afford it.
- R4400,R5000 or higher processor
Although not important for PREPI note that floating point number crunching
can be up to 2x or more faster than the R4600
- 32 - 64 MB RAM
- 1GB INTERNAL HARD DRIVE
Operating systems are getting bigger (!) and SG offers a lot of useful additional
software/graphics tools which are easier to download and store on system disk.
Our 1GB systems disks are typically 50-60% used (includes F77 & C compilers but NO
user accounts on system disk).
- 17 INCH MONITOR
The old 15 inch (note 15inch = about 12 inch diagonally !) monitor was an
insult to technology. I dont think SG bundle this any more.
You should also look at the SG WWW site at http://www-europe.sgi.com
In future we intend to port this software to other platforms supporting
X-Windows and OpenGL