Re: NARVAL & ENX : two potential new packages
> Xavier Grave writes:
>> Very soon I will start to package two software used in our lab : NARVAL
>> [1] and ENX [2].
>> I would like to know if these packages can be of interest to the Debian
>> Science community and so be hosted by Debian (in Squeeze + 1) or if it
>> is better to have our own server.
> [...]
>> [1] http://narval.in2p3.fr
>> [2] http://enx.in2p3.fr
>
> I think it would help the debian-science team if you would explain the
hardware
> requirements for NARVAL and ENX.
NARVAL is used to read/process data from different kind of electronic
boards.
In the first versions of NARVAL, only VME boards were supported, and that
required specialised hardware :
- VME Crate
- VME boards for detector readout
- VME CPU boards
Now, NARVAL supports also PCI, USB boards, and most of what you have a linux
driver for. So to run NARVAL to acquire data, now one can start with a
standard PC. It is used for example for the students nuclear seminar we host
in our lab (one PC + one PCI board to get data from a very simple setup).
NARVAL is also used to replay experiment on PC farms constituted of about 30
1U PCs (so called pizza boxes), which except the 1U format are standard PC.
> I think that, if they require bespoke hardware not available to the
general
> public, including them in Debian would not be such a good idea. If they
can run
> on the lay man's personal computer or with inexpensive specialized
hardware,
> then OK. See also
My idea to have NARVAL related to debian-science was to ease promote Debian
in science area where for the moment we have Scientific Linux. In return
NARVAL hosted in Debian as binary packages will also help people to accept
Ada software because they don't have any more the excuse about not knowing
how to compile and so on...
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