Computer operating systems: HEPiX news

In October the North American and European Chapters of HEPiX (the HEP UNIX group established to share worldwide high energy physics experience in using the UNIX operating system - March 1994, page 18), held meetings at Fermilab and Saclay. The two-day Fermilab meeting attracted over 30 attendees from some 12 sites in the US, as well as representation from CERN. The three-day European meeting two weeks later was attended by some 70 people from 30 sites in Europe, the US and Japan. Both meetings featured some common themes such as the growth in the use of AFS (the Andrew File System) for distributed access to central filebases, and the continuing trend away from mainframes towards farms of UNIX workstations and/or servers. Other topics of interest included an update of the POSIX standards efforts, an online presentation of an experimental graphics interface, first impressions of new utility for batch job control in UNIX, the latest news on the spread of the HEPiX login scripts and a review of trends in magnetic tape technology. Detailed minutes are in preparation and will be published in the HEPNET.HEPiX news group in due course. In the meantime, the transparencies presented in many of the sessions at both conferences can be consulted via the World-Wide Web at URL http://wwwcn.cern.ch/hepix/ meetings.html