??? Harris NightHawk 4400 Realtime

[Tim Raymund]

We've gotten a good offer from Harris on a NightHawk 4400, an
88100 based realtime unix machine.  This offer competes with an
offer from DEC on a DECstation 5000.

After reviewing the spec sheets, I'm pretty favorably impressed by
Harris' offer.

There are some questions that I'm hoping someone can help with.

1. What's the SPEC rating (or MFLOPS) of the 4400 as offerred?
   The 5000 does about 18.5 SPECmarks, the 3100 about 11.3.  A SPECmark
   is a measure of floating point performance.  Don't be impressed by
   MIPS - that's only integer stuff.

2. Are we getting: 

       SCSI interface?
            3100 and 5000 use the SCSI.  Currently its a good interface for
            getting cheap peripherals.
       Eithernet interface?
            Thick or thin doesn't matter, but it must have it.
       A good FORTRAN compiler?
            We get VAX Fortran and the MIPS f77 from a software library.
       A console/workstation?
            DECstations come with 19" bw monitor, mouse and keyboard
       8mm tape drive?
            Nice for compatibility and data
       ? Disk, ? cpus, ? memory


3. Does their UNIX support NFS?  Network File Serve: allows disks to
   be shared across the network.  Ultrix, the DEC version of
   Unix, (obviously) can do it.

   Does it include X11R4? X11 is a standard windowing system used 
   for the workstations.  R4 is the latest release.  The new Ultrix
   doesn't have it, but it's very easy to add.

   Does their Unix support disk striping?  Disk striping can
   significantly speed up i/o.  The new Ultrix supports it.

4. What will it cost in maintenance: hardware and software?  Currently
   we have no regular hardware maint, though we probably pay a few
   hundred per year for miscellaneous fix-ups, and we recently paid $2k for
   those department vaxs.  Software is $600/year for VAXstation 2000's,
   $900/year for the VAXstation II, and $1200/year for the 3100 (I think).
   Those prices will change by next year.  We receive access to the complete
   Ultrix op sys with no limit on the number of users, and various software
   packages (windowing, graphics, compilers for most popular languages,
   etc.)


Potentially, a 4 CPU version of the 4400 could be almost 10x the
speed of the 3100.  That's quite a bit of raw computing power...
A single CPU version should be at least twice as fast.
By comparison, the 5000 is one and a half to two times faster.

DECstation 5000 we are considering: $12k

    19" bw monitor, mouse, keyboard
    R3000 MIPS risc processor, 16 Mb memory, 600 Mb disk
    18.5 SPECmarks
    Ultrix 4.0 (BSD 4.3) and MIPS f77 compiler
    SCSI device (up to 7) and thin Eithernet

Prices could change soon as DEC is set to announce a new (faster)
version of the 5000.


Thanks for any info!
tim raymund
traymund at uiwpl.ece.uiuc.edu

--
Tim Raymund
Wave Propagation Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Illinois, 1406 W. Green St., Urbana, IL 61801-2991 USA
Internet: t-raymund at uiuc.edu   Phone: 217/333-2931   FAX: 217/244-5624

-- 
=========================== MODERATOR ==============================
Steve Stevenson                            {steve,fpst}@hubcap.clemson.edu
Department of Computer Science,            comp.parallel
Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29634-1906 (803)656-5880.mabell