🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.rt article <1731.27028f1f@zeus.unomaha.edu>, svehla@zeus.unomaha.edu wrote:
:Hello
:
:I am searching for information pertaining to the IBM R6000 line
:of computers.  What have been your experiences?  Do you have any
:concerns?  Can you provide me any benchmarks?  What about AIX?
:Any information you can provide me on these questions and on tuning 
:AIX would GREATLY BE APPRECIATED!!!
:
:Thanks in Advance!
:
:Ernie Svehla

Well, the 6000 is one fast little beastie.  Since we here deal mostly with
floating point math, I devised a little program quite some time ago and
timed it on a number of different systems....  here's what I got.  Lower
numbers are better.


Convex C220	convex.csd.uwm.edu	8.1 seconds
RS/6000/530	thales.math.uwm.edu	8.8 seconds
RS/6000/320	thales.math.uwm.edu	11.0 seconds
DEC/3100	berkeley DEC		25.1 seconds
Solbourne 5/600	miller.cs.uwm.edu	33.3 seconds
IBM RT 6151/125	archimedes.math.uwm.edu	100.6 seconds
Unisys 7000/40	csd4.csd.uwm.edu	131.2 seconds
IBM 6152 RT	banach.math.uwm.edu	165.5 seconds

The Solbourne and the Convex are both dual processor machines; if you have
two processes running, you can halve their numbers.  These systems were all
running some variant of BSD UNIX (SunOS, Convex UNIX, 4.3 tahoe, AOS).

We were quite impressed that it rated so close to the Convex.

However, I'm far from pleased with AIX.  It tries to do too much.  They've
added so many layers of complexity that I'd really just like to scream.  I
haven't even begun to figure out how the swapping and process scheduler
interact.  The other day, I let a csh session sit for about 45 minutes.  I
typed "logout" and it sat there for one minute, sixteen seconds before it
did anything.  Not sure if anything else was running on the machine, but
that's ridiculous.  Little things don't work.  tset bombs the hft, since it
sets -opost and -ff1.  I had to hack around that little joy of a problem....
xinit sometimes exhibits that behavior as well, and the X server crashes
from time to time.  When it does crash, we haven't figured out how to reset
the display!  It doesn't go down automatically to text mode like the RT
does.  It just sits there, dead bitmap display.  You can bring xinit back
up and bring X down, but it's still locked in bitmap mode.  The crashes
happen more often when you're running X11R4 clients from another host.  I'm
not pleased with "aixterm" either.  I like the enhancements, but it just
won't work correctly with a standard BSD "xterm" termcap.  I've messed up a
couple files in vi on remote machines.  There may be solutions to all of
these X problems, but I'd prefer not to have to go digging in the first
place.  IBM's also distributing an earlier release of X (note the famed
Xeyes bug with long, skinny Xeyes windows, etc)...

Even little things like ps.  I'd like a standard BSD ps.  I know all the
flags already  :-)  Oh well.  It's a good number cruncher though!  I just
wouldn't buy one for home.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee - Department of Mathematics
jgreco@archimedes.math.uwm.edu		USnail: Joe Greco
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Disclaimer: I don't speak for the Math Department, the University, or myself.