The following doesn't really address how MTS came to two sites in Brazil, but it does give a little information about the two sites.
From MTS:FORUM: Item 582 16:55 Apr23/80 16 lines 5 responses BOETTNER, DONALD (UM) Addresses for Brazilian Installations According to Jeff Ogden, who just returned from there, the correct addresses for the Brazilian installations are as follows: EMB: Stan Angilley Flora Program Supervisor CNPq - S.I.P. W3 Norte Quadra 507 Bloco B 70 000 Brasilia D.F. Brazil RIO: (This one same as in MTS Newsletter 57 page 2 list) Julio L. Botelho CBPF/CNPq AV. Wenceslau Bras 71 CEP 22.290 Rio de Janeiro - RJ BRAZIL From MTS:FORUM: Item 587 21:25 Apr29/80 117 lines 5 responses OGDEN, JEFF (UM) What I did for my spring vacation - MTS in Brazil As some people already know from Don's item in MTS:FORUM I've just returned from a 15 day visit to the MTS installation in Rio de Janeiro. The trip was made at the invitation of Julio Botelho and CBPF/CNPq. They paid for my flight down and back as well as a hotel room and meals during my stay. In return I gave several informal talks to their staff and one talk to their users about MTS. The RIO installation is the second MTS installation in Brazil. Currently it is a department (GPD) of an institute for the study of physics (CBPF). CBPF is in turn an institute of a national government research organization (CNPq). CBPF is located next to the University of Rio de Janeiro, but it has no formal ties with the university. However, CBPF and the other CNPq institutes do accept students who wish to continue their studies and they do offer graduate degrees. In addition to providing computing services to CBPF the RIO installation also provides services to other CNPq institutes, primarily the National Observatory and the mathematics institute. The RIO installation is small. They run an IBM 370/145 with 127 pages of real memory, 10 locally attached 3277 displays, two hardwired terminals and two RJE stations connected to a 3704 emulating a 270x. They have 4 3330-I disks connected to one control unit on two channels and three 2314 disks connected to one control unit on one channel. One 3330 is used for paging and a 2314 is the HASP spool pack. They have no 2301 or 2305 paging devices and one of the two channels used for the 3330s is also used by the 2314s and the magnetic tape equipment. There are six people on the programming staff including Julio. Two of the programmers are experienced in assembly language and the rest are learning. Everyone on the programming staff and all of the users that I met were very enthusiastic about MTS. There are some 600 ccids in the accounting files, but I don't have a good feel for how many individuals this represents. They are running a hybrid system made up from a special version of D4.0 for small machines plus selected updates from D4.1, D4.2 and various RD tapes. In particular they have installed the CIDA updates from SFU. Because of they way the IPLREADER and RAMROD work the entire resident system must fit into real memory. To keep within this limit everything that can be loaded by PISTLE (and several things that I wasn't sure could be loaded by PISTLE, like the OPERATOR job) have been moved out of RAMROD and into SEG2:S2FILES. Even with these changes the system is within one page of the real memory limit. This means that the only updates that can be applied to their system are ones that don't increase the size of the system. Applying updates using *CDUPDATE is also a bit of a pain on such a small paging bound system and they are eagerly awaiting the plus version of *CDUPDATE from UBC. They don't have *ASMH, so most recent updates have required at least a little modification to work under *ASMG and some updates have proved almost impossible to convert. I tried to make it clear that without *ASMH this problem would only get worse in the future. The system runs with from 8 to 12 active lines and zero or one batch jobs using between 900 and 1100 virtual pages during the day. Maximum paging activity is about 22 page-ins per second. Processor idle normally runs between 40% and 60% with the PDP using about half of the CPU time. To say that the system is badly paging bound is an understatement. The default global time limit in batch is 1 min. and the default local time limit for LSS is 10 secs. During the day it is not uncommon for all of the terminal users to be in LSS. LSS is used more to encourage batch use than to balance the terminal and batch load. During the next year the RIO installation will become the major part of a new CNPq institute that will provide computing services to the other CNPq institutes and also do research in computer science. As part of this change they hope to replace their 370/145 with a 3031 or a 370/158 with 2Mb of main memory. With luck this will be done early in 1981. The original MTS installation in Brazilia still exists and I talked to Stan Angilley on the phone while I was in RIO. That machine (also a 145) how has a full megabyte of storage and Stan is working on installing the D4.2 system. EMBRAPA has apparently lost some or all of its funding and they are selling time (VS1 time I'd guess) to make ends meet. Stan didn't say so directly, but the impression I got from talking to him and Julio is that very little MTS work is being done in Brazilia other than the work on D4.2 by Stan. Stan wasn't sure if he would be able to attend the RPI workshop or not. Stan and Julio both mentioned that they have been having problems getting shipments of tapes from Michigan. It seems that some of the shipments have arrived at ports of entry other than RIO or Brazilia and that the shipments must be claimed at that port of entry. This is a little like having something sent from UBC to UM arrive in Miami and having to send someone from Ann Arbor down to get it. There doesn't seem to be any trouble with small tapes sent through the mails and clearly marked as having no commercial value. Both Stan and Julio think that they have solved the various bureaucratic problems that have delayed the payment of their installations' part of the MTS distribution costs. The payment from the RIO installation should be on its way now and payment from Brazilia should be on its way as soon as UM can send a new bill that doesn't include Stan's name. Both Julio and Stan have received tentative inquiries about using MTS from several organizations. If these inquires prove to be serious they will ask the organizations involved to contact Michigan directly. I agreed to ask Dr. Finerman to write Stan and Julio a letter outlining in general terms Michigan's views on how such inquiries should be handled. I think that the RIO installation would like to have a second MTS installation near by if only to provide a bit of moral support and a larger base of people with MTS experience. And part of a December 2010 note from Jim Bodwin: I visited the Rio MTS site to install the latest release under VM/XA. They had trouble getting disk controllers there so they had an old 4381 (4341?) that had an internal disk controller that was normally connected to the CPU via 2-foot channel cables. At Rio they had the cover off the machine and ran channel cables from their real CPU (3081?) to the internal controller on the 4341. Very odd. |
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