Finite Element Analysis?

[De Clarke x2630]

Organization:	UCO/Lick Observatory, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA

My engineering shop is moving from AT's to Suns (hoorah!).  They have a
FEA package running on an AT, used daily, cost them $500 (with edu
discount);  they'd like to run FEA on the Sun instead, for obvious reasons
of speed and model size, but their pet vendor said a license for the Sun
package would be $20,000 list, $10,000 to us.  They cried a lot.

Does anyone know what's available in the FEA line for Sun 4 / Sun 3, and
what one expects to pay for a modest mech-engineering type FEA package?
Is $20,000 really industry-average?  Are there any PD products from the
techie schools?  Thanks -- better mail to me directly as this is kind of
special-interest.

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