whm@arizona.UUCP (Bill Mitchell) (09/07/84)
Several weeks ago I posted an article asking for comments about what
people thought of Gould UNIX Systems. I received many notes asking
for copies of what I found out, but I received no notes that offered
information about the Gould systems.
I've had some opportunities to use some Gould systems during the last
few weeks and I've found them to be very satisfactory for the most part.
I have noted a few problems with them however:
Their current release is 4.1c. They're talking about having
4.2 by January.
They have some general problems with debuggers. Apparently,
breakpoints can only be set on word boundaries. This seems to
have the effect that breakpoints are sometimes missed. Also,
if one tries to set an adb breakpoint at x, it will actually
be set at x+4. I found this to be very irritating. In addition,
dbx has loads of problems. I was using it on a very small
program and I blew it up a number of times without even trying.
They currently don't have Lisp or Pascal. However, a third
party has alledgedly ported Franz Lisp. I think they will
also be offering LNS Pascal.
On a 32/67, which they claim to be 50% faster than a 780, I've
run a number of benchmarks (no floating point though) that
have come out with performance about equal to that of a 780.
I'm going to be getting some time on a 97 very soon and they
claim that it's 4-5x a 780, but I'm predicting that I'll see
about 2.5-3x a 780. (On the other hand, I'll be very surprised
if the 790 doesn't have exactly the performance that DEC is
promising.)
I suppose that if I was making the decision tonight as to whether to go
with a 790 or a big Gould system (the 97), I'd go with the 790 because
while Gould does present attractive performance advantages and attractive
price advantages (perhaps made marginal by some whopping DEC discounts)
I think that the software hassles (and accompanying lack of them on a 790)
would cancel out Gould's strong points.
Bill Mitchell
whm.arizona@csnet-relay
{noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whmgwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (09/07/84)
So what's this "790" you mention? A new VAX? Does anyone have comparative performance and price between the 790 and the 780?
ron@BRL-TGR.ARPA (09/10/84)
From: Ron Natalie <ron@BRL-TGR.ARPA> But where can I get a 790? Gould is delivering now. -Ron
whm@arizona.UUCP (Bill Mitchell) (10/05/84)
Several weeks ago I posted a short note giving some personal observations
about Gould UNIX systems. Since then, I've had an opportunity to do some
very brief and informal (about two hours worth) testing on a 32/97 and I
thought I'd give a quick report of what I found.
I should say that since there seems to be ample evidence that the Gould
processors run as fast as Gould claims on a wide variety of applications,
my main interest was in finding anomalous data points.
Unfortunately, the dial-in line on the 32/97 I was using was extremely noisy
and I was able to transfer only some very short test programs to the 97.
Because of this, the bulk of my testing was done via standard programs.
The Gould system was a single processor 32/97 with 4M of physical memory
running Gould's "baseline 8.1" which is a 4.1c more or less. The tests
were also run on a Vax-11/780 with 4M of physical memory running 4.2. I
was on the only person on the 97; the Vax tests were run with a few other
users on.
In no particular order, here are some results that are representative of
what I found: (Times are in seconds and are averaged over several runs.)
nroff /usr/dict/words
97: 31.6 user/ .8 system
Vax: 140.2 user/ 5.0 system
dd if=x of=y ibs=1 (where x is a 50kbyte file)
97: 1.1 user/ 19.0 system
Vax: 7.3 user/ 62.2 system
gdata 10000 | cat | cat | cat >/dev/null (gdata 10000 generates 10000
50-character lines)
97: 3.0 user/ 1.6 system
Vax: 6.1 user/ 1.7 system
fork 1000 (Does 1000 fork and waits of a child that dies first thing.)
97: .4 user/ 32.1 system
Vax: 2.2 user/ 33.5 system
ex <ldup.in (opens a new file, puts a 50 character line in the buffer
and then repeatedly duplicates the buffer with 1,$t
until it contains 32k lines.)
97: 8.2 user/ 7.1 system
Vax: 27.0 user/ 16.0 system
As a rule, the 97 ran in the 3-4 times a Vax range for processes that
didn't do many system calls. The presence of system calls seemed to
disproportionately slow down the 97 with the forking process being the
extreme example.
Although my 97 testing is perhaps best characterized as "cursory", the
system really does have a nice feel to it and I'm convinced that the
performance figures that Gould quotes are representative and not
"optimistic". The only complaint that I have with the 97 and associated
software is the debugger problems I mentioned in an earlier article. If
those problems could be corrected then I don't think I would have any
reservations whatsoever about recommending the 97.
Bill Mitchell
whm.arizona@csnet-relay
{noao,mcnc,utah-cs}!arizona!whm