Numerical applications of minicomputers at the National Bureau of Standards

摘要

At the National Bureau of Standards, minicomputers are used in a variety of applications requiring the acquisition and processing of physical data. In this paper, a general view of minicomputer use in laboratories at NBS is given. Several specific applications with current and future requirements in numerical processing are discussed. Computation on small computers is typically constrained, more severely than on large computers, by hardware limitations. These can be overcome only by mathematical software that is not required in large computer systems. The validity of computed results depends on this software as well as on the same type of mathematical software that would be used to solve the same problem on a large computer. But mathematical software of known high quality is less readily available for minicomputers. Some possible means of alleviating the software problems of minicomputers, and some steps taken in this direction at NBS, are discussed.