[comp.parallel] IBM RISC 6000

fay@wpi.wpi.edu (Peter R Fay) (12/21/90)

Jack Dongarra's "Linear Equations" Benchmarks put an IBM 6000 model
550 (41 MHz) doing Linpack at 27 Mflops (not hand-optimized), which is
equivalent to a Convex, Cray-1S, etc. Of course, hand-optimized it is
"only" 62 MFlops and can't compete with the vector machines.

Does anyone have anything bad to say about it's Flop performance? Is
this benchmark representative of its performance on other benchmarks?
Granted the 6000 is a different animal than the vector machines, but
does anyone buy it anyway for heavy Flop applications because of it's
cost or because its less essential to hand-optimize your code in order
to get decent performance out of it?

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~ Peter Fay                      College Computing Center        ~
~ (fay@wpi.edu)                  Worcester Polytechnic Institute ~
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jet@uh.edu (J. Eric Townsend) (12/27/90)

In article <12380@hubcap.clemson.edu> fay@wpi.wpi.edu (Peter R Fay) writes:
>Does anyone have anything bad to say about it's Flop performance? Is

As long as you aren't trying to do *anything* else (like run a window
system, serve files, print documents, etc) you'll get good performance.
Unfortunately, the 6000 seems to go catatonic while it context switches.
I don't know where this problem lies (hopefully it's software and
will be fixed in a future upgrade).

The RT-based 8CE is rumored to be the model on which a new "parallel
6000" beast will be built.  If this is the case, I might have to
actually give in and say I like an IBM product. :-)


--
J. Eric Townsend     Internet: jet@uh.edu    Bitnet: jet@UHOU
Systems Mangler - UH Dept. of Mathematics - (713) 749-2120
"If you are the system administrator and this is the first time you are
logging into your system, use the login name root." -- IBM RS/6000 docs