mark@mips.UUCP (Mark G. Johnson) (07/04/87)
Here are some benchmark measurements of floating-point circuit
simulator programs. I used "HSPICE" release 8601k, a commercial
product from Meta-Software, Inc., and "Berkeley SPICE 2G6" release
3/15/83, which is available in the public domain.
Three circuits were simulated; the contents of these input files
are included in a companion article. Each circuit was run five
times and the average of the five runtimes (reported as user CPU
seconds by "time spice <in >out") is tabulated. A total of 30
simulations were run on each machine:
(2 simulators) * (3 circuits) * (5 trials).
The tables below have two columns for each simulator program:
"seconds" and "Vaxes". These represent the number of user CPU
seconds, and the speed of execution (relative to a Vax 11/780 == 1),
respectively.
As you can see, the tables are very sketchy at best. Notably
missing are measurements of *BIG IRON* (e.g. CRAY-2, Cyber-205,
Amdahl, IBM) {can you help us, eugene miya?}, *PARALLEL MACHINES*
(e.g. Connection Machine, Alliant, Sequent, FPS, Multiflow, Cydrome,
Shiva), *LITTLE BOXES* (e.g. PC/AT, Compaq 386, PC/RT), plus a
roundup of the usual suspects (e.g. DEC 8800, Apollo, IBM-4300,
Convex, HP Spectrum, Sun-3/260, Clipper, Pyramid, Edge, AMD-29k,
NS32k, etc.).
Please feel free to post measurements of additional machines; or,
if you prefer, email to me and I'll summarize for the net.
====================== TABLE 1. DIGSR circuit ======================
HSPICE-8601k Berkeley-2G6
MACHINE seconds Vaxes seconds Vaxes OS, compiler, notes
------- ------- ----- ------- ----- -------------------------
Microvax-II 1320.6 0.96 1671.8 0.89 Ultrix V1.1, BerkF77 V1.0
Vax 11/780 1272.2 1.0 1485.6 1.0 4.3BSD, BerkF77 V2.0
MIPS M/800 142.3 8.9 146.4 10.1 UMIPS-BSD V2.01, f77 V1.20
====================== TABLE 2. BIPOLE circuit ======================
HSPICE-8601k Berkeley-2G6
MACHINE seconds Vaxes seconds Vaxes OS, compiler, notes
------- ------- ----- ------- ----- -------------------------
Microvax-II 558.9 0.82 653.8 0.79 Ultrix V1.1, BerkF77 V1.0
Vax 11/780 457.0 1.0 518.6 1.0 4.3BSD, BerkF77 V2.0
MIPS M/800 51.3 8.9 54.5 9.5 UMIPS-BSD V2.01, f77 V1.20
====================== TABLE 3. TORONTO circuit ======================
HSPICE-8601k Berkeley-2G6
MACHINE seconds Vaxes seconds Vaxes OS, compiler, notes
------- ------- ----- ------- ----- -------------------------
Microvax-II 406.6 0.98 597.1 0.87 Ultrix V1.1, BerkF77 V1.0
Vax 11/780 398.2 1.0 517.1 1.0 4.3BSD, BerkF77 V2.0
MIPS M/800 49.4 8.1 51.0 10.1 UMIPS-BSD V2.01, f77 V1.20
--
-Mark Johnson *** DISCLAIMER: The opinions above are personal. ***
UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!mark TEL: 408-720-1700 x208
US mail: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086