eugene@ames.UUCP (Eugene Miya) (06/21/85)
Today, we sent down to the NASA Dryden Flight Research Facility
to view a 4 processor ELXSI system which was purchased about 1 year ago.
Several interesting observations:
For net.space: lots of neat aircraft sitting on the runway. A shuttle
mission was in progress. What struck me: the many aircraft hangers
which are like garages except with things which fly, row after row of hangers.
Row upon row of interesting aircraft: F-111s, F-4, T-33s, T-38s, F-14s,
F-15s, F-16s, the F-20 with a film crew (probably making a commercial),
B-52s, the Scissor wing, the LEM trainer, X-1, M-24 (lifting body).
The M-24 is surprising because there is so much wood (frame) and
it's inside has a "just struck togther look." It's next to some
recreational camping trailers at the Dryden Rec Office: reminds me
something you can borrow for the weekend.
For net.arch: the system was configured with 4 processors, two memory
controllers and an I/O controller. There are about 10 disks (8 Fujitsu
Eagles), and a Hyperchannel to several SEL-32s. This system is replacing
a Cyber 70 series mainframe.
For net.unix: EMBOS is tauted as UNIX-like. It's to a degree like UNIX
as VMS is (sort of) like UNIX. They are running release 9 of version 1
of EMBOS. It uses main memory intelligently for performance (caching)
and minimizes big I/O (but you can feel this at times). The editor is
emacs with a slightly different set of keybindings. Unix SV.2 is not
yet running on this system. I can give more info to those people interested
if you send me mail. You have to get use to things like:
v --- prompt
: infile > proc > outfile
: infile > proc ->> outfile
^ -- concat stderr as well as stdout to outfile
: infile > proc1 | proc2 >> outfile || proc3
^--- "||" == unix '&'
commands like files == ls == vms directory
dir == cd,pwd == set default
bind == ld == link
and so on
--eugene miya
NASA Ames Research Center
{hplabs,ihnp4,dual,hao,decwrl,allegra}!ames!aurora!eugene
emiya@ames-vmsb.ARPAron@brl-tgr.ARPA (Ron Natalie <ron>) (06/21/85)
The problem with the ELXSI is that the performance figures they quote are for FORTRAN. Applications written in C that we tested only run at about half of the speed they claim. -Ron