Help on workstation purchase

[LKAY at ecs.umass.edu]

OK, net, bear with me 'cuz I'm sure this has been asked before.....

I'm planning a workstation purchase soon and my choices are: SPARC, an IBM
RS/6000, or one of DEC's new boxes. I need some advice as I'm not as on
top of the market as I should be. I've got $15-20k to spend (I'll get an
educational discount on this purchase), and I've got 'till August to make
up my mind. My requirements in order of importance are:

-> Speed, specifically FLOPS. The box will be used for research in
   numerical modeling in semiconductors.
-> Good C and FORTRAN compilers (no bugs!)
-> Easy, bugless Ethernetting.
-> Short ship time. I've already heard stuff up on comp.sys.ibm.rt that
   some models of the RISC boxes already have 6-8 mo. queues.
-> Availability/compatability of applications software, e.g. Framemaker or
   equiv, plotting packages, etc.
-> Graphics capabilities (and quality of graphics tools). I don't need
   amazing speed for stuff like ray tracing, just a good plotting type
   environment.

I will be using this as a standalone (possibly hanging one diskless
machine on it at a future date). My personal inclination is to get a SPARC
even though it's a little slower, due to the much higher quality of
support and software I've experienced from Sun. I'm good at what I do but
I'm not a Unix guru.  I don't need a lot of bells and whistles.

I'd appreciate any E-mail about this. As always, if there's enough
interest, I'll post a summary to the net. Thanks in advance.

Leonard Kay, KB2R  UMass/Amherst     
(413)545-4762      lkay at ecs.umass.edu