“By bringing together some of the world’s leading scientists from a wide range of disciplines, the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is fostering something that was lacking — their direct, peer-to-peer collaboration. In doing so, the center aims to further the development of leading edge scientific computing as it is applied to some of science’s longstanding and emerging problems,” Andrew K. Burger reports for MacNewsWorld.
“Such endeavors typically rely on Unix servers and desktop workstations to meet their IT needs. Nearly all the IIC’s researchers have opted for Apple Macs as their desktops of choice, however. Systems engineers are also opting for Macs and OS X rather than Linux-based PCs as the Mac OS X Unix interface enables them to interact with other Unix hardware and software,” Burger reports.
“The strength of Apple’s 3-D imaging and visualization tools are a big plus for IIC researchers. The fortuitous meeting of an astronomer studying star formation and a computer scientist working on developing the 3-D Slicer — a cutting edge open source medical imaging and visualization software — led to their collaboration and the creation of the Astronomical Medicine Project. Initial results have given researchers new perspectives on star formation while work continues to produce multi-disciplinary solutions that can be gainfully used by astronomers, atmospheric scientists and geophysicists, as well as medical researchers,” Burger reports.
“The shrinking of the price gap between Apple’s computers and those of competitors and Apple’s policy of not selling stripped down versions of its computers is raising Apple’s profile in the enterprise sector, JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg. told MacNewsWorld,” Burger reports.
Full article here.
@Rheinhard
” I love the fact that I can run things like my numerical computation code I’ve written in C, and using Terminal and X11, pipe output to XWindow GNUplot just as if I was on a Unix box”
I like that Apple include the gcc complier in Xcode but this isn’t anything that’s specific to the Mac. The gcc compiler is available in almost every platform, unfortunately even Windows.