desktop super computers

[Rick Adams]

Following are some real timings from a real program. This is not a
true "benchmark". The program is a real seismic analysis job that we use a lot.
It is heavily cpu intensive and heavily floating point.

I consider it a good measure of the floating point capacity of a processor.
It does a very good job of measuring the kind of things that WE do, which is
what a good benchmark should. Of course, for a different person, this may
not be a good indicator of anything. For example, it doesn't show
how badly things degrade when more than one process is running.

Times are measured with /bin/time. If you want to consider a Vax 11/780
with an FPA as 1 MIP, (not unreasonable really) the first column can be thought
of as MIPS. The Sun 3/260 with FPA comes in at 3.4 MIPS, which is not a lot
less than the claimed 4.

The low numbers are provided mainly for amusement. The range of machines
represents what I had access to, nothing else.

(I'd be happy to run this on a Cray or Amdahl to get a nice top end figure if
anyone has some spare cycles...)

The Convex time can probably be sped up by changing the code to vectorize
better, but the point was to run this unmodified on all the systems.

---rick

 x 780	  Total		   User		  Sys
10.297	    479.1	    469.3	   6.7 Culler 7/10 *
 6.193	    796.5	    534.8	 210.6 Culler 7/10
 4.586	  1,075.6         1,056.3         19.3 Gould 9080 w/mult. accel. @ utah
 4.432	  1,113.1	  1,064.2	  48.9 Convex C-1
 4.137	  1,192.3 	  1,164.1         28.2 Vax 8600 w/fpa 4.3bsd @ utah
 3.847	  1,282.2	  1,257.4	  24.8 CCI Power 6/32 w/fpa 4.3bsd
 3.616	  1,364.2	  1,339.7	  24.5 CCI Power 6/32 w/fpa 4.2bsd
 3.435	  1,436.0	  1,410.8	  25.2 Sun 3/260 w/fpa -ffpa sun3.1 +
 3.347	  1,474.1	  1,450.6	  23.5 Celerity 1260D 3.2.50/betacc
 3.315	  1,488.0	  1,450.8	  37.2 Gould 9080
 2.937	  1,679.2	  1,635.5	  43.7 Celerity 1230 3.1?
 2.725	  1,810.4	  1,751.5	  58.9 Celerity 1260D 3.2.47
 2.404	  2,052.3	  2,017.3	  35.0 Sun 3/160 w/fpa sun3.2
 2.057	  2,398.1	  2,342.5	  55.6 Celerity 1200 3.1?
 1.398	  3,529.5	  3,486.0 	  43.5 Gould 6000
 1.290	  3,823.2	  3,785.5	  37.7 Sun 3/260 w/fpa -f68881 sun3.1 +
 1.159	  4,257.3	  4,253.2	   4.1 Vax 11/780 w/fpa 4.3bsd *
 1.118	  4,413.3	  4,462.6	  50.7 Vax 11/780 w/fpa 4.3bsd
 1.079	  4,572.0	  4,382.3	 189.7 Sun 3/160 w/68881 sun3.0
 1.000	  4,933.1	  4,867.3	  65.8 Vax 11/780 w/fpa 4.2bsd
 0.980	  5,036.0	  4,973.1	  62.9 Sun 3/50 w/68881 sun3.0
 0.859	  5,745.8	  5,711.8	  34.0 Sun 3/160 sun3.0PILOT
 0.765	  6,448.1         6,327.2        120.9 Vax 11/750 w/fpa 4.3bsd @ utah
 0.289	 17,091.2	 17,005.0	  86.2 Pyramid 90x @ rutgers
 0.230	 21,413.1	 21,332.9	  80.2 Sun 3/260 w/fpa -fsoft sun3.1 +
 0.197	 25,031.0	 24,470.9	 560.1 Vax 11/750 @ verdix
 0.146	 33,679.9	 33,424.3	 225.6 Sun 2/120 -fsky sun1.4
 0.141	 34,867.8	 34,822.2	  45.6 Sun 3/160 -fsoft sun3.0
 0.114	 43,134.0	 42,971.2	 162.8 Sun 3/50 -fsoft sun3.0
 0.046	107,399.3	105,875.5	1523.8 Sun 2/120 sun1.4
 
* Changing program i/o to use 8K byte buffers
+ Sun 3.1 user programs 3.2 kernel

The Suns can be compiled 3 different ways.
	-ffpa	With Floating Point Accelerator
	-f68881	With M68881 hardware floating point
	-fsoft	Software floating point