Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks: RS6000 v. SS-1+

[Dan Packman]

RE: reports of slow programs and difficulty porting to RS6000 versus
    Sparcstation 1+

If the application used details of system internals or depended on features
not yet present in AIX (eg, diskquotas), then porting might be a problem.

For what it is worth, I have recently finished benchmarking a *real*
application [The application is a line-by-line infrared radiance calculation]
on several platforms.  The results were (minutes:seconds):

   CRAY XMP           ~3:00
   IBM RS6000/320     14:45
   DEC 5500           23:26
   Solbourne 5E/802I  51:30
   Sparcstation 1     86:46

Standard fortran programs port easily.  System throughput is excellent.

PS: Standard disclaimers.
 
Dan Packman     NCAR                         INTERNET: pack at ncar.UCAR.EDU
(303) 497-1427  P.O. Box 3000                   CSNET: pack at ncar.CSNET
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