IBM 6000 vs HP 9000 series 700

[Chin Fang]

In article <1145 at hrshcx.csd.harris.com>, wdh at hrshcx.csd.harris.com (W. David Higgins) writes:
|> 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?
|> >
[some stuff deleted]

|> 	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.
|> 
[some benchmarks deleted]

As an experienced aerospace engineer (five years at two USA's primier avaition 
companies) and a long time user of many Finite Elment Analysis can programs,
I would like to add more to above.

ANSYS is capable of using the Finite Element Method to solve engineering programs

in (1) static structural analyses, like landing/crach loads on the wing of an            fighter both in linear and non-linear formulations,
   (2) structural dynamic analyses, like the the manovering loads on the wing
       of a F15,
   (3) heat transfer problems, like the temperature effect on the nozzle of a 
       rocket. 

and many physical problems that can be mapped into (1)-(3) above.

It's probably the secondly popular FEM package used in Aerospace/Automotive/
Civil/Neuclear/..  The primier pkg is the enhanced commerical version of the 
formally NASA sponsored NASTRAN, called MSC/NASTRAN, (MSC, MacNeal and Schwandler,
both were heavily involved in the original NASA NASTRAN project).

The core of such pkgs is a set of numerical linear algebra routines and usually
both Swanson and MSC program them to suite the specific platform they are intended
to run on.  So other than the smartness of programmers, the differences among the 
hardwares' capabilities of handling numerical linear algebra problems play a 
dominant role as well.  eg. MSC has a vector version of MSC/NASTRAN for IBM 3090.

Such can programs are usually front-ended by a graphics preprocessor for building
a math model interactively, and back-ended by a graphics postprocessor for 
viewing TONs of results generated by such pkgs :-(

It's my experience that in solving a problem, typically the human time is the
longest portion of the entire project time (modeling the physical structure,
checking out the math model, interpreting results, meetings, and yes, reports)
so such benchmarks are seldom of *VERY* much importance even though all of us
probably would like to run the darned problem on a fast machine.  As a example,
a rocket nozzle may take several weeks to model, maybe hours to solve on 
a typical powerful technical workstation like RISC 6000, and another few weeks
to prepare everything else I mentioned above.

As to comparing 486 boxes to technical workstations like RISC 6000s, I think it
is better for joke than for reality, as a CISC processor with some hybrid pipe-
line features built in, even at 33Mhz, it offers less than 2 MFLOPs.  Even
a wimpy SPARC 1+ can handily beat it in this regard.

This leads me to... a 40Mhz i860 offers 80 MFLOPs.  Can IBM Austin people design
a addon board to utilize i860 for us?  After all, IBM owns part of Intel and 
if RISC 6000 lines are designed for technical users, I would say the more MFLOPS
the bigger your market share will be :-)  Now this is THE MOTIVATION for IBM :-)

80 MFLOPS!  Beat Cray if you want (you can already, the hardware is there :-).


Sincerely,

Chin Fang
Student Unix System Administrator
Academic Information Resources
Stanford University

grad student
Mechanical Engineering Department
Stanford University
fangchin at leland.stanford.edu