mcbryan@cmcl2.UUCP (Oliver A. McBryan) (05/17/85)
For the last 2 months I have had the opportunity to try out a remarkable new computer - the Celerity C1200. Celerity will provide a 50% discount to Univ- ersities on the first machine and 40% on subsequent models. Thus the basic machine with 4MB memory and a 120MB disk is available to universities at $42K, or at $59K with a 450MB Eagle disk. The machine is very compact, and both hardware and software are astonishingly reliable for a new product. Several numerical users can be accomodated effectively - I have not determined how many. However I regard it as a floating point engine rather than a many-user system. The machine is based on the NCR 32-bit processor, with a custom floating point board that is astonishingly fast. Software consists of a full Berkeley UNIX 4.2bsd, with all the networking software working perfectly. All FORTRAN programs I have tested run faster than on a VAX 780 running UNIX 4.2bsd. One program was 8.5 times as fast (math library calls are in the hardware), but many complex FORTRAN codes run 1.5-3 times a VAX. As a typical example, a fast Poisson solver based on the FFT ran twice as fast as on the VAX, while a code describing flow of bubbly liquids was 5 times as fast. The worst speedup was 1.25 times the VAX. C programs run at about the speed of a 780. Disk I/O with the 120MB MAXTOR is slow, but with the Eagles it exceeds the VAX 780 under UNIX 4.2, transferring data at a higher bandwidth while using a lower percentage of cpu time (680KB per sec on file reads, 630KB on writes). Celerity East coast rep. is Mike Tyrrell, 617-8721552 (I dont work for them!).