Porting Horace to Linux

The National Meteorological Centre (NMC) of The Met. Office has, for some time, been using a Unix workstation based system called Horace for the display and generation of meteorological information and products. A significant part of the cost to the user of any system is the hardware required on which to run it. With the advent of new powerful desktop personal computers (PC), it has become possible to get a similar level of computing performance to a workstation from a PC at a fraction of the cost. The Linux operating system is a free UNIX system that runs on a PC. By porting Horace to run on this operating system and using high-specification PCs it is possible to reduce the costs of hardware significantly. Over the past few months a pilot project has been started to attempt to port some parts of Horace to run under the Linux operating system. This paper discusses some to the issues raised during that project.