deh7g@newton.acc.Virginia.EDU (David E. Husk) (07/28/90)
We recently were able to try out a YARC NuSuper coprocessor
board installed in a Mac II. While we were at it we ran some
"real world" Fortran benchmarks -- programs which we consider
typical number-crunching applications. We concluded the YARC
is a seriously fast machine, as you can see from our results,
given below. Best of all, the YARC board is relatively
inexpensive.
The board comes in two flavors, one for Mac II's, one for
AT-compatibles using 80286, 80386, or 80486 CPU's. It runs
independent of the machine CPU, which means you can run a big
program on the board and still wordprocess or whatever without
the machine getting slowed down. It runs C or Fortran, but you
must use the compilers sold for the board. From what we
understand, the Fortran is evolving into something like VMS
Fortran, but doesn't cover some of the uncommon stuff yet.
The board we tried was a 25 Mhz board; YARC is now making a
30 Mhz board in its place. We cooked up some projected numbers
for the 30 Mhz in our benchmarks and concluded that even in
real*8 it will beat the new IBM 6000 SuperStation (which costs
MUCH more). In addition, we've heard rumors of a 40 Mhz board
yet to come.
We're impressed! We liked the board a lot, and we found
the people at YARC very responsive to our questions.
The board's suggested retail price was $4995 for the 25 Mhz
board. Incidentally, they also sell parallel processor boards.
To talk to these people:
Yarc Systems Corporation
27489 West Agoura Road
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
(818) 889-4388
We are just some physicists with low budgets and too many
numbers to crunch; we don't work for YARC and they didn't put us
up to this.
'Overlapd' is a triple integral coarse grid (real*4).
'IG3D' is a 8x8x8 Ising monte carlo model (real*8).
All the machines tested have a 32 bit word, except the IBM 6000
is 64 bits, and the CDC Cyber is 60 bits.
OVERLAPD.F IG3D.F
Computer Time Ratio Time Ratio
(sec) (sec)
IBM 3090 (mainframe) 152 0.72 1485 0.86
YARC NuSuper 30 [estimated] [177] 0.83 [1441] 0.83
YARC NuSuper 212 1.00 1729 1.00
IBM 6000 SuperStation 250 1.18 1537 0.89
DecStation 3100 model 38 328 1.55 4580 2.65
CDC Cyber 180/855 435 2.05 **** ****
Sun 4 SparcStation 479 2.26 **** ****
DEC MICROVAX III 493 2.33 **** ****
MAC II/FX 789 3.72 **** ****
MAC II 2671 12.6 **** ****
PDP 11/34 12660 59.7 **** ****
Husk@virginia.edu
Ejl6m@virginia.edu