Sun

From Waisman Brain Imaging Wiki

Suns are scientific/engineering-oriented computers manufactured by Sun Microsystems, Inc. (http://www.sun.com/). They run a version of UNIX callled Solaris. Suns are generally designed to take large amounts of data stored on networked file servers, process the data quickly, and return it over the network to the file servers. They are very stable and robust compared to Windows PCs, but take a bit more effort to learn how to use.

At one point, we used Suns for most of our heavy data processing at the labs, but nowadays, we mostly use Linux computers, as the Linux computers tend to have significantly more "bang for the buck" (more processing speed and capacity for each dollar spent). We still have many Suns in both labs, as they are still a good choice for some computing tasks. In the early days of UNIX workstations, Suns were much less expensive than their main competitors (IBM, HP, SGI, and Apollo), but were just as capable. As a result, Suns were quite popular at universities, and many of the first MRI and PET data analysis programs were written only for Sun, or for Sun and perhaps one other platform.

Examples of Suns in the labs are LAN104 at Brogden and tezpur at Keck.

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