IBM 6000 vs HP 9000 series 700

[W. David Higgins]

In article <1991Jun26.191020.26093 at cs.utk.edu> Dave Sill <de5 at ornl.gov> writes:
>
>Can anyone shed any more light on this AN-SYS benchmark and what it
>measures?
>

	I'm not a user of ANSYS, but I've been involved in porting
the program to several platforms.  Take all of this with a small
chip of salt...

	ANSYS is a finite element analysis program, used to model
physical structures and the stresses placed upon them.  SP-3 is 
a "moderate sized 3-D solid statis analysis of a pressure vessel
containing 1020 eight node solid elements".  ANSYS is a product
of Swanson Analysis Systems Inc. (SASI), Houston PA.

	From what I remember ANSYS in general, and solving SP-3
in particular, spends much of its time doing linear algebra
(dot product, etc.).  I suspect a machine that does well on the
Linpack benchmark would do equally well with ANSYS.

	I don't believe Dvorak's column gave SP-3 times for Intel 
x86 boxes;  let me remedy that by giving some times from SASI's
03/20/91 benchmark report:

SP-3:
Machine			CPU	Elapsed		Comments
--------		----	----		------------------------------
CRAY-2			 27	 29		One processor used for timings
CRAY Y-MP 8/128		 17	 17		One processor used for timings
IBM 6000/540		 68	 70
ALR 486/33mHz		360	360
HP 486/25mHz		550	550
Gateway 386/33mHz	804	804

	No wonder Dvorak conveniently forgot to include x86 times.

	There is some small truth to Dvorak's claim that SP-3 doesn't
give the Cray a chance to strut it's stuff, although it is probably vector
length and not system overhead that is involved.  SASI's LS4 benchmark
problem is considerably larger in size than SP-3.  Some times follow:

LS4:
Machine			CPU	Elapsed
--------		----	----
CRAY-2			647	699
IBM 6000/540		4139	4656

	Notice that the IBM-6000 took 2.5x the Cray running SP-3, but
the ratio grew to 6.4x when solving LS4.  LS4 is a _large_ problem; 
SASI says 600mb of disk is required to complete the run.  The benchmark
reports I am quoting from did not include HP snake times, so I cannot
give the HP times for LS4.  Dvorak gave SP-3 CPU times of 49 seconds for
the HP 9000/730, and 68 seconds for the HP 9000/720.

	I hope this information is useful.
-- 
--  W. David Higgins                   wdhiggins at hrshcx.mkt.csd.harris.com
--  Harris Computer Systems,  Ft. Lauderdale, FL  33309       305-973-5351