merrill@bucasb.bu.edu (John Merrill) (11/11/89)
My group is interested in purchasing serveral servers to support graduate student computing needs. These machines will be used in an environment very unlike the standard time-shared environment; most, if not all, of our users are heavily compute-bound. It is our desire to buy several compute-powerful, but IO-weak, UNIX systems. These systems must run X11R3, but they need not have attached displays. (In fact, it might be something of an advantage if they did not.) We would, if possible, prefer to have most of the BSD 4.k (1 <= k <= 5) utilities around, although this is not a necessity. They must also be relatively inexpensive; we cannot afford to spend huge amounts. We are considering the purchase of SparcStation I's with large amounts of associated RAM and small third party disks to provide compute power. Are there other vendors who could provide similar or near-equivalent performance for less money? Do the readers of this mailing list think that there are other sun configurations which can provide roughly equivalent performance for the dough? Please E-mail me, and I'll summarize to the mailing list if there is interest. John Merrill | ARPA: merrill@bucasb.bu.edu Graduate Program in | Cognitive and Neural Systems | 111 Cummington Street | Boston, Mass. 02215 | Phone: (617) 353-5765
fdr@solbourne.com (Russ Fellows) (11/16/89)
I am somewhat biased, on the information that I am giving but not much. There is currently one Sun 4 compatible workstation shipping. Solbourne Computers is currently shipping 100% binary compatible (guaranteed) workstations. Since you seemed to be most concerned wiht HEAVY compute ability, and less so with IO performance, Solbourne's machines are quite applicable. Currently the price/ performance advantage over Sun's is as high as 3 to 1. Solbourne is the ONLY company currently shipping 33 MHz Sun 4 SPARC machines. Also, the machines are designed around a central bus (about 128 Mb / sercond) with the ability to have up to 4 CPU's and 64 MB of memory in one machine. Since the OS is designed around a master/slave relationship some applications (particularly parallel type programs, such as Neural Net simultaions) have a 4X performance over 1 CPU systems. Also, the 33MHz SPARC board gives about 2X the performance of a 16MHz Fujitsu board (Sun 4 currently uses 16 MHz Fujitsu). Thus for about 2 times the money of a Sun 4 you can get a Solbourne Series 5 (the 33 MHz Cypress chip), which could give you 8X the performance for your applications. Solbourne's address is: Solbourne Computers Inc. 1600 Pike Rd. Longmont, CO. 80501 ph. 1-(303)-772-3400 Russ Fellows somewhat employed by the above.
treed@uunet.uu.net (Timothy Reed) (11/21/89)
>Computers is currently shipping 100% binary compatible (guaranteed) >workstations. Since you seemed to be most concerned wiht HEAVY compute >ability, and less so with IO performance, Solbourne's machines are quite >applicable. Well, 99% compatible. According to Solbourne, Sybase SQL server does *not* run on Solbourne, though the front end stuff will. Tim Reed Fusion Systems Group, Ltd.