scm%gitpyr%gatech.CSNET@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA (Scott C McKay) (01/24/86)
I am currently looking at the following workstations to do CAE
(primarily Schematic capture and SPICE simulation) and would greatly
appreciate any comments on the machines
Apollo 660
Daisy
HP-9000
Intergraph Interpro-32
MicroVax II
Sun-3's
VALID
I am also considering the following software packages (again
primarily Schematic capture and SPICE simulation) and would also
greatly appreciate any comments on the software usefulness
Analog Design Tools
CAE Systems
CV Methesus
Daisy
GE Calma
HP Design Center
Intergraph
Mentor Graphics
VALID
Thanks in advanceworks@ucbvax.UUCP (01/30/86)
We have some SUN-3's that we are trying to port a non-CAE package to.
The binaries are very large and thus we find that our disk and RAM
memories are used up exceedingly fast.
Also in the same flavor as the SUN-3, you may want to look at
Integrated Solutions (an NBI company). They have a box that looks
like the SUN-3 that they claim is faster (SUN has 1 1/2 wait states
to memory, the Integrated Solutions machine has 0 wait states on
write and 1 wait state on read.) They also have some better graphics
support, or so they claim. They are at:
Integrated Solutions
1140 Ringwood Court
San Jose, CA 95131
(408) 499-6929
BTW: I am not connected with Integrated Solutions, just looking at
their technology.works@ucbvax.UUCP (01/31/86)
I work for Daisy. I use our machine for software development. It's
pretty good. Our hardware guys use our machines for designing our
new machines. They think it's pretty good to. And since they use
it, they feed back comments to us programmers before the customers
get the software. The result is better software. So, one thing to
consider as you evaluate machines is "do you design hardware? Or are
you a bunch of programmers with no customer contact?"
Of course I'm biased.
Daisy's proprietary workstations are 286 based, moving to the 386 as
it becomes real. Much of our basic software runs on the IBM PC/AT
but not all of it because the PC/AT doesn't have sufficient
horsepower for big projects. (For example, circuit, logic, or fault
simulation of large designs chew up vast amounts of CPU power.) We
are also porting some stuff to the MicroVAX and to the bigger members
of the VAX family. This is simply because the VAX is the standard
and we aren't stupid.
Customers buy our proprietary workstations because they are faster at
running CAE tasks than "standard" platforms such as Apollo, SUN,
PC/AT, and MicroVAX. Our proprietary machines have special hardware
to accelerate functions found in CAE tasks, especially for graphics.
(We have two patents in the area.) We also offer a good range of
optional equipment for even more speed: hardware accelerators for
simulation and chip place & route, physical modelling systems for
simulation of boards that use VLSI parts (for which models don't
exist), and multiple-CPU systems for raw general-purpose compute
power.
Our machines run Daisy software and third-party software.
(Obviously, more third party programs run on the PC/AT and MicroVAX
than on our proprietary hardware.) Our software is quite good: a
nice schematic editor is the front end to a reasonably complete
verification environment for correct-the-first- time designs. We
follow that up with software for automatic routing of semi-custom
chips and a really good polygon editor for full-custom ICs. (I'm
especially biased here 'cause I wrote large chunks of the
semi-customer and full-custom interactive editors.)
We also have system support software: design management tools,
interfaces to other systems, and other dull stuff needed to complete
the job. Our network support is Ethernet with a transparent file
system (similar to SUN but using XNS.) Our Operating System, "Daisy
DNIX" (Hey! I didn't pick the name!) is a UNIX-compatible system.
At the user and programmer levels, it is Unix. But we have added our
networking support (something 4.2 bsd just gasps at) and a window
manager integrated into the Operating System and the tools (not just
a window toolkit kludged to fit on top of a 1970's vintage
TTY-oriented user interface.)
All in all, I like it. Now if only they could turn down the air
conditioning in my office (it's winter time, guys), I would be happy.
Oh, by the way, I'm typing this on my office machine, using a virtual
VT-100 terminal emulator hooked up to a VAX over Ethernet. I use the
VAX simply to get access to USENET. I, like all other Daisy
programmers, develop my code on the same machine we ship to
customers. So you know it has been debugged reasonably well. (We
test our machines to extremes. Do you know how expensive it is for
use to send a service engineer to your site to fix something? Or to
process a customer-submitted bug? $$$)
I hope this helps a bit.
cordially,
David Schachterworks@ucbvax.UUCP (01/31/86)
I used to work at Daisy. Both their hardware and software are hardly worth considering. Last I heard, they were *still* trying to get their multi-window Unix clone running (on 80286's). There are other companies (e.g., Sun), which have already accomplished that much at least, and on better hardware (68020). This is not to discourage you from evaluating Daisy, but I couldn't resist putting in my two cents worth. Bob Weissman !well!rlw G.WEISSMAN@SU-SCORE.ARPA
works@ucbvax.UUCP (02/06/86)
So nice hearing from a disgruntled ex-employee. How does one re-gruntle? Contrary to Mr. Weissman's disparaging hearsay comment, our "multi-window Unix clone" runs quite nicely. It has been in customer hands since November '84 (!) and was beta-sited heavily for six months last year. It is now in full release. And it runs on 80286s, much to our ex-employee's amazement. Let's try to stick to facts and less to Mr. Weissman's unsubstantiated "Last I heard,..." comments. By the way, our "multi-window Unix clone" does a bit more than Mr. Weissman's appellation might suggest. Good networking, 3278 emulation, very fast graphics, a fast file system with file locking, and a kernel based not on Unix but on a real-time operating system kernel are some of the features. Calling it a "clone" is an ad-hominem argument. Finally, Mr. Weissman's claim that Daisy's products are without merit is unsupported. A large customer base and a high repeat-order rate are testimony to some level of customer satisfaction. Are our products perfect? Certainly not. Do our products solve everyone's needs? No. But we do offer a fairly wide range of products to handle very sophisticated needs. And with several hundred programmers and engineers improving existing pro- ducts and creating new ones, we are addressing more and more of the electronic engineer's CAE needs. My fellow employees are not as incompetent as Mr. Weissman's posting might suggest.
works@ucbvax.UUCP (02/07/86)
I have heard lots of good things about the Daisy systems. I have seen some very good demonstrations of the system. I have been using a schematic capture application available on a large Amdahl machine. The application routes the schematic for the engineer. I find this saves a lot of my time and makes changes to the schematic almost error proof. I was told that Daisy was going to come out with this capability in the near future. This was more than 2 years ago. Is this available today? If not, what happened? Ken Hodor hplabs!hodor
Andreas.Nowatzyk@UNH.CS.CMU.EDU (02/12/86)
There are not just disgruntled ex-employees that have low opinions on
Daisy products. You can add scores of frustrated user and system-
maintainer. Based on 2.5 years experience with the Daisy-workstations
(both the low-end PC/AT version and the high-end Mega-Logician with
PMX) as both user and system maintainer, I would strongly recommened
to take a very carefull look at this brand of machines before buying
one.
The workstation was originally based on an Intel 8086/87 processor.
It was later 'upgraded' to the 80286/287 processor. This helps to
understand several problems. The worst of which can be contributed to
the dreadfull 64K byte segments, which caused tons of rather
arbitrary limitations (say a limit of the number of symbol names for
components on a drawing page). This caused a lot of frustration.
These limitations slowly vanished over time, but quite a few are
still around. The cost of switching to a larger address mode was a
substantial loss in performance. The machines are sssslllooowww!
(notable execption: the hardware accellerators are reasonably fast).
The interactive programs (various editors, utilities and some
compilers) are very slow compared to similar programs on SUN's. Part
of this is due to the use of a large number of intermediate files
(again a consequence of the memory addressing problems). Practically
all mainstream design applications take at least 30 sec. to load
(that is with a fast Eagle Disk upgrade).
As mentioned before, the UNIX-like windowing system has finally
arrived (in December '85), but it is quite buggy. Actually it would
be quite nice if it were about 3times faster and had 3times fewer
bugs. The later will probably happen, but it is extremly rare that
anything became faster with a new release. Also, experience has it
that all new releases introduce a decent number of new, subtle bugs
along with with great improvement like " '=' have to be replaced with
':=' except if .... - please update your files". The current software
evolved by adding features to a basic design that did not anticipate
this growth. As a result, it is in need of a fundamental rewrite from
scratch, but that will not happen because of the existing customer
base.
An other major problem is that the system is hard to learn. This is
mainly due to:
- A voluminous, but incomplete and poorly organized documentation.
- Inconsistent command interfaces (you can tell the different
authors apart by their creativity of using different syntax for
similar functions: there are lisp types, pascal freaks, unix
wizzards...) Much fun, but can be confusing.
- IBM style Hex-listings please real programmers, but not
necessarily new user
- Most intermediate file uses undocumented binary files to ensure
that that user can't figure out what is going on (for example:
some bugs in the Drawing EDitor can insert invisibale information
in a file that either crashes the editor whenever that page is
touched or (even better) an application 2 processing steps later).
Experience with ASCII based CAD systems on VAXen or SUN's show
that superior performance is possible with readable files.
- Several special purpose languages needs to be learned. Lacking the
power of a real programming language, a large number of special
function calls are added to bridge the gaps.
- JCL fans will love the various control files, parameter files,
configuration files, format files. It helps if you remember the
Fortran Format edit commands...
I don't think that anyone would consider using these systems for
anything else but CAD work unless he has no other options. As
mentioned before: the accelerators are fast (say 30 min to simulate a
40K gate chip, but it takes about 24h to compile such a design).
Many opinion expressed in this post are shared by other Daisy user at
different sites. If you want more information/horror stories feel
free to contact me directly (this is not too interesting to the
entire net).
Cheers -- Andreas Arpa: agn@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu
uucp: ...!seismo!vlsi.cs.cmu.edu!agnworks@ucbvax.UUCP (02/20/86)
This discussion about Daisy workstations is very interesting to us as
we are now in the process of evaluation Daisy as a CAE vendor.
Please send me more information about your experiences with their
hardware/software.
Thank you in advance. Please hurry as we are nearing the end of our
evaluation.
Please send me mail if you can.
--
Douglas Otto (608) 271-3333 ext 2346
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