fedorkow@BBN-VAX.ARPA (Guy Fedorkow) (11/26/85)
Spice Benchmark results guy fedorkow, Nov 25, 1985 at bbn In the process of qualifying a machine for a vlsi workstation, spice benchmarks were run to compare Sun, DEC and Masscomp machines. Three spice decks were used, with run times from under one to about 5 minutes. The two circuit configurations used contained 17 and 19 transistors. In the third test, the default gate length parameter was made larger to cause the simulation to fail to converge. Tests were run on a VAX 11/785, Sun3/160C, the MicroVax II and two Masscomp models, the 5400 and 5700. Both the sun and the masscomp offer 68020/68881 processor/floating point combinations. The masscomp machine claims to be running the '881 at 16 MHz, while the Sun claims only 12 MHz for the '881. Both run the '020 at 16 MHz. Tests on the MicroVax II were run at UCB by George Jacobs. The tests on the VAX/785 were run in the early morning at BBN, when the load factor was under 0.30. Time values cited are total elapsed time, as measured by the 'time' command. All times are expressed in seconds. All the machines tested had at least 4 Mbytes of memory. All were running Spice 2G.6. Results machine ckt A ckt B ckt C VAX 11/785 65 320 189 masscomp 5400 50 278 172 Sun 3/160 50 277 172 MicroVax II 74 410 272 Two of the three tests were run on a masscomp 5700, with improvements of about 5%. With the exception of the MicroVax execution time, results obtained by the simulations seemed to be identical in all substantive ways. Because of the peculiarity of DEC floating point, the vax results contained negative zero values, while the motorola implementation could not. The non-convergent case failed to converge in exactly the same way, at the same time value, for all machines, giving some assurance that numerical results are the same, even for ill-conditioned computations.
info-vlsi@ucbvax.UUCP (11/28/85)
I am in the process of calibrating spice on my system and noticed your posting on performance results. Could you foward me a copy of the input data that you used for spice? I would like to run the same series on my system. thanks. bob. -- Bob Ollerton; Celerity Computing; 9692 Via Excelencia; San Diego, Ca 92126; (619) 271 9940 {decvax || ucbvax || ihnp4}!sdcsvax!celerity!bobbyo akgua!celerity!bobbyo
info-vlsi@ucbvax.UUCP (12/01/85)
>Spice Benchmark results > >guy fedorkow, Nov 25, 1985 at bbn > You should try the parallel Spice systems sold by a company called Shiva. They are based on the Balance 8000 computer manufactured by Sequent Computer Systems and run a highly parallelized version of Spice written by Shiva. This system is much faster than a VAX and probably lower priced. Yes, I do work for Sequent. No, I do not officially represent Sequent or Shiva. (I am just very proud of our systems which beat VAXes hands down in any contest you want to set up.) I can not even say a whole lot about Shiva. The reports of their design that I have heard are very good, but, unfortunately, proprietary. You should talk to Shiva or to John Serbin (!tektronix!ogcvax! sequent!johnj) here at Sequent for official information. I just hate to see anyone miss out on such a good system just because they haven't heard about it before. --Brian M. Godfrey
info-vlsi@ucbvax.UUCP (12/02/85)
>>Spice Benchmark results >> > You should try the parallel Spice systems sold by a company called Shiva. >They are based on the Balance 8000 computer manufactured by Sequent Computer > ... >--Brian M. Godfrey Sorry, everybody, for putting a sales pitch on the net. I did an "R", but didn't realize that having info-vlsi in the path would put it on the net. --Brian