IRAF 2.12.2-BETA impressions
January 4th, 2004 by admin
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p>So I finally got around to installing the new IRAF beta on my desktop G4. The real news is that the control-c bug on Jaguar/Panther has been FIXED. Mac users can now control-c tasks to their hearts’s content. I will update the FAQ soon with this new, once this version of IRAF is out of beta.
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p>In other news there are questions of speed improvements, since the new binaries have both “Mac OS X compiler optimizations” along with the mere fact they were built with gcc 3. I did some tests with a series of image tasks. I believe it was some rotates and an ellipse median on a Crab nebula raw image.
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| iBook G3/600 384 MB RAM IRAF 2.12.1 |
PowerMac G4/400 512MB RAM IRAF 2.12.2-BETA2 |
PowerMac G4/400 512MB RAM IRAF 2.12.1 |
| Time – 1min 4sec | Time – 1min 8sec | Time – 1min 23sec |
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p>You see the speedup the G4 gains in the version upgrade. I include the ibook just as a curiousity. For most command line tasks when there is no vector code involved, my iBook does its clock speed better than the G4, so you’d sort of thing it’d do things 50% faster. The G4 has a faster drive, more memory, though. Anyway, we see an improvement with the new IRAF.
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