Celerity C1200 Computer

[Oliver A. McBryan]

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 amazingly 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!).