3D input & accounting

[Reinhard Doelz]

>>BTW, has anyone given though to building real controls?  Even a
>>joystick and peddles (no throttles, etc) would be a godsend.  It took
>>me several days to get the hang of turning with a mouse and it still
>>doesn't feel right.

>We have a ``Dimension-6'' -- a steering ball that senses rotation and
>translation in 3 dimensions.  I hooked it up to flight(1), and the
>controls instantly felt much more natural.  I'm sorry I can't give
>you a detailed comparison between mouse and ball control.

This is  only productive posting I found in all these flight stories - 
I'd like to know whether you could give me the adress of the company
and how you managed to write a driver!

> I wonder just how much CPU power goes into flight compared to other
> applications for the SGI.... :-)

This is how my accounting looks like: 

Feb 20 04:00 1989  MONTHLY TOTAL COMMAND SUMMARY Page 1


                                     TOTAL COMMAND SUMMARY
COMMAND   NUMBER      TOTAL       TOTAL       TOTAL   MEAN    MEAN  
NAME        CMDS    KCOREMIN     CPU-MIN   REAL-MIN  SIZE-K  CPU-MIN

TOTALS     69708 12446349.00  14379.77    247666.88  865.55    0.21 

discover     300  7888990.25  12963.13     16366.52  608.57   43.21 
qdiff          6  2550093.19    279.29       437.12 9130.54   46.55 
insight      188   889154.56    182.11      1222.76 4882.42    0.97 
moledt.e      38   404009.39    147.63       211.98 2736.65    3.88   
news_ser     111   187500.03     84.12      5403.99 2228.93    0.76   
dbx           42   169607.62     57.44       388.76 2952.95    1.37   
connolly       5    87442.77     47.24        56.00 1851.12    9.45   
flight        13    71511.59     55.54       110.95 1287.53    4.27   
wsh          735    33168.14    106.15     14945.98  312.45    0.14   
make        2115    28957.38    102.30       310.66  283.07    0.05   

>I need to use the accounting package. The following files are referenced
>with acct (1m). they are acctcms(1m), acctcom(1m), acctcon(1m), acctmerg(1m), 
>acctprc(1m), acctsh(1m), runacct(1m), acct(2), acct(4), and utmp(4). 
>Has anyone used this package? how does it work? Is there a guide i can use inst
>ead of the manual? has anyone used this package successfully? Please let me kno

I just used the default package supplied by SGI - works poorly if you 
really need accounting. You may forget it, and bill the power consumption
of the graphics screen as a measure...

* If you have huge jobs running several days, accounting returns wrong data. 
   See above: Our IRIS runs at nearly 100% load all day. This means that within
   20 days we should have 20*24*60 = 28800 total CPU mins, but it only reports
   about 15000 - and the rest is just "forgotten"! (I checked system activity 
   and the output files. There have been 8 days where the start/endpoint of one
   job was not on the same day. 8*24*60 = 11520 and this added up gives approx.
   what we expected.)

* If you need to bill disk usage, I didn't figure out how to get more than one
   disk sample per day - suggestions welcome ! - I've heard that some users 
   use a disk more than once a day ...

I am really worried about SGI's support in this aspect. 

I need to bill my users for connect time, cpu time and disk usage. The fee
option provided (last column in the reports, needs to be built in - is not 
default) is a rather underdeveloped tool. What I do now is that I just awk 
the output of the monthly reports and multiply the columns needed  by factors.
Simple and not bright, but it works at least. So the only thing we need is
a really working accounting package. Is there a similar desaster on SUN's ? 
At least UNICOS is able to bill you correctly (sigh). If there is any package
on the UNIX market, I'd really like to try it.

That's for today, 
Reinhard 
  
  ************************************************************************
  *   Dr. Reinhard Doelz           *           SWITZERLAND               *
  *     Biocomputing               *                                     *
  *      Biozentrum                * doelz%urz.unibas.ch at relay.cs.net    *
  * Klingelbergstrasse 70          *                                     *
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