Questions about Pyramid/Sequent

[Karl Kleinpaste]

csg at pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
   Anybody want to voice their thoughts on this one? I make the silly things,
   so I don't know what most people are interested it.

For myself, trying to maintain the facilities for a large flock of
academic users, I am inclined to have a small number of heavy-duty
CPUs, so that when it's getting anything done, it's getting a great
deal done.  And the tendency for one process to take over the system
is not what I'd call severe.  It happens, but it's quite rare.

The faculty, on the other hand, seem to have more of an interest in
the sorts of problems that can't be addressed without a dozen or so
processors.  From my perspective, I find some of their applications
somewhat peculiar, hence not especially practical, but the practical
has to be developed out of the theoretical and impractical anyway.

So we compromise :-).  We use a dual-processor Pyramid (and a couple
of other Pyrs besides) as the department's central services machines,
getting the grunt, practical work done of pushing mail and news around
and doing heavyweight computationally-intensive things (e.g., network
simulations that run for 3 days), and generally being a connectivity
hub for these users; and we also have a MultiMax and a BBN Bfly which
are used exclusively by the faculty and grad students for their
theoretical, possibly `impractical' experimentation.

--Karl