General Question about the 'Best' Platform for NONMEM

At Glaxo we are currently planning to replace our VAX 4000-90 because it is now too slow for our needs. I would be grateful of any information/experience that any of you have on other hardware platforms. We are currently looking at using a bigger, faster VAX, Alpha or UNIX box, possibly incorporating multiple processors. In particular, when purchasing your own systems did you consider different platforms? Did you discover that NONMEM didn't work well on any? Were there any platforms that lacked a suitable FORTRAN compiler? Were there any other pro's and con's that you discovered? What did you decide to buy and why? All information will be gratefully accepted and will be treated confidentially. I look forward to hearing from you. Please reply to GMS4175@GGR.CO.UK or, on CompuServe, to 100425,3600. Many thanks, Response/question from: Ed (166ETG@delphi.com) - 11 Nov 1994 Hi. We are running NONMEM on an IBM ESA 9000 under VM. Some of the scientists here (Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company in Connecticut) were wondering about using NONMEM on an IBM PC under Windows. Do you think this is a good idea ? Some of our jobs now on the shared IBM run 12 hours. Has anyone compared NONMEM on various platforms ? Should I consider a workstation instead ? One more thing. We have found a limit of 400 records under VM on the ESA 9000 due to the loader not being able to go above 16 meg. Does anyone have any info on number of records vs platform ? One scientist here wants to run a 600 record problem. We considered renting time on a CRAY. We here Boeing might have NONMEM on a CRAY. Does anyone know if this is true ?