eugene@pioneer.arpa (Eugene N. Miya) (01/22/88)
This evening at the Golden Gate ACM Chapter, Sidney Fernbach
(best known for his classification of supercomputer (Class 1-7))
noted that he now did feel there were class 7 machines. It was his
opinion that the Cray-2 and the NEC SXX do constitute class 7 machines,
but that the ETA-10 did not. Sid also felt it was a big mistake to put
"N-different Unixes" on all those mini-supercomputers, but when asked
what they should run, he replied, "CTSS [Cray Time Sharing System] is good."
Some of his anecdotes reminded me of one subtle incident that happened to
me several years ago (short). I was attending a conference with
parallel computing as the conference theme (not ICPP). One evening, we
were to take buses (about 5 or 6) to a theme park for dinner. 300
people lined up behind one hotel door to load up sequentially into one
bus per time (all buses were on the concourse) and there were several
parallel doors. I concluded that the way people think about parallelism
in daily life will affect the way they program parallel machines.
I got off the elevator, walked past the line thru one of the other doors
into a non-loading, waiting bus, then waited for its turn to load.
That's what I get for being impatient. I hope all who read this note
use side doors.
Oh on a more personal note: to the man from SHELL who wrote and I could
not response: No, sorry, I have not really used queueing network models
or Mean Value Analysis (MVA). I have looked at the books by
Lazowska/Sevcik/ et. al, and Ferrari's book. These guys do read
comp.arch. Liba Svobodova also has an interesting book on performance
measurement as well. There is an ARPAnet mailing list performance@cs.wisc.edu.
To get on the list ask PERFORMANCE-REQUEST@cs.wisc.edu.
Posting to the net does not constitute celerbrity status: I know nothing.
From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:
--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA
"You trust the `reply' command with all those different mailers out there?"
"Send mail, avoid follow-ups. If enough, I'll summarize."
{uunet,hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene