ss@wanginst.UUCP (Sid Shapiro) (02/06/85)
Hi there folks,
An aquaintence at AT&T told me that in his shop, if one program, for example,
troff, started eating too many cycles, they would "hang a
troff-processor-box" off his vax (or other machine) to handle the troff jobs
- they would be shipped to the box, and when done, they would be shipped back.
That sounds pretty good to me, but he also said that these were proprietary
kinds of boxes, so my question is:
Does anyone do this type of "off-line" processing in general, and
specifically, does anyone use/know of a scribe-processor-box off which might
hang off of a vax running 4.2 (actually Ultrix)?
Any pointers to poeple doing it, or vendors who sell such stuff would be
most appreciated. If I get enough responses, etc., etc.
Thanks,
Sid Shapiro -- Wang Institute of Graduate Studies
[apollo, bbncca, ucadmus, decvax, linus, masscomp]!wanginst!ss
ss%wang-inst@Csnet-Relay.ARPA
(617)649-9731swd@mcnc.UUCP (Stephen Daniel) (02/12/85)
A company called Avalon out on the west coast makes a unibus board that you plug into your vax. It has an 8mhz 32016 processor and 1Mbyte of memory. It comes with a little kernel that talks to a 4.2bsd device driver (also supplied) so that it may implement all system calls by talking to a process running on your vax. It costs about $10K (quantity 1). For an extra $1K you can get a cross compiler. Then you can have a lot of fun. You take any compute bound C program whose working set size is less than one megabyte (paging is expensive for this beast) and go acc -o program program.c (run cross compiler) program -options (run your program on the avalon). Porting code is very easy. The btye ordering is even the same as a vax. Except for one gross program, everything we've tried has just compiled and run the first time. We are in the midst of expanding the list of programs we run on it, but currently I think we use it for yacc, lex, ccom (the guts of the C compiler) and ditroff. In the past we used it to do some raster processing for an ink jet printer, but we've since bought a dedicated raster box for that printer. Raw speed is about .5x an unloaded 780 on typical programs. This means that with any normal load factor you win big. More details on request. Enjoy. Stephen Daniel (decvax!mcnc!swd) (swd@mcnc)
jbn@wdl1.UUCP (02/13/85)
I like it. But of course you have to pay for an additional UNIX licence for each board if you want to run any of the delivered UNIX programs.