FW: Topspin (or PC vs. SGI) or 'How Samba saves the day'

From: Jens Knudsen (JKnudsen@arenapharm.com)
Date: Thu Mar 03 2005 - 09:25:50 PST


Thanks to all of you who gave your opinions/views, experiences with Topspin and servers and suggestions in general. I appreciate every input (I'm the sole NMR guy in my current company so it's nice to communicate with others who face/have already dealt with the same perspectives/problems).

 

We will definitely have to explore a number of other avenues, and MestreC, Nuts and ACD will be among them, so Topspin will be on hold until further investigation. In preparation for (hopefully/potentially) some inspections from various regulatory agencies in the not-too-distant future, I have made a conscious decision to only let NMR data be accessible on the IT backed-up Linux server (which in turn is NFS-mounted to the O2 data processing station where users log into from their PC's using X-Win32. But this limits us to a) screenshot pasting (less than ideal), and/or b) printing to file as jpeg, tiff, png on the Unix side, followed by ftp'ing that file back (in binary) to the PC world for pasting into a B. Gates document format.

 

Well, since I wrote the previous paragraph, I can now correct myself because, low and behold, my IT group has come to the rescue; they already had Samba running (for some other purpose), which has turned out to allow us to bypass the ftp-step by mapping the Linux drive (where the NMR data live) on the PC. This way, we can almost do cut-and-paste: we can take advantage of our existing technologies, i.e. using X-Win32 to log into our SGI data station with a node-locked license of the XWIN suite, print-to-file function in XWINPLOT, saving the spectrum as file type e.g. jpeg in the 'Portrait'-orientation - because I found that when pasting this jpeg into, say Word, it seems to always get turned another quarter turn - and we most often wish the spectrum to come out in 'landscape'. I'll be writing up a little description of how to do this for my diverse crowd of users with very different backgrounds, not only diverse with respect to NMR experience but also diverse in computer-savvyness but all willing to learn and adjust - making my life and work here, a challenge but also a lot fun.

 

Jens

-----Original Message-----
From: Jens Knudsen [ mailto:JKnudsen@arenapharm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, March 01, 2005 7:35 AM
To: BUM
Subject: Topspin (or PC vs. SGI)

Esteemed colleagues,

Please give me your input/advice on how powerful a PC you think (or maybe:
know) is necessary to allow between approximately 10 and 20 simultaneous
users to process Bruker data in Topspin without detrimental effects or
significant slowing. My question is intended to gauge the needs for a PC
that we wish to set up as a data processing station only. I will try to
keep 'my' three O2 spectrometer hosts alive as long as I can, and we still
do have the luxury of an additional O2 for processing also but I'm giving
in and trying to make it more direct 'copy-and-paste'-easy to put a
spectrum in a PC document.

Thanks in advance for any responses.

Jens Knudsen
Arena Pharmaceuticals
San Diego, CA

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