The class of programs that will be run are written in fortran and are cpu/
floating point/transendental intensive. They should live in core on a lightly
loaded machine.
I ran it on an AS 200 4/233 and got a great boost in performance (as expected
see numbers below). I figured that a NoName board would give reasonable
performance at a good price. However the vendor suggested a pentium 133
would give better performance. I found someone with linux on a p120 to
run the program with disappointing results.
Here are the various numbers:
SPEC SPEC program run
int fp in hours
P120 133 99 19
P133 147 109 ?
Alpha 233 157 183 4.5
Mac 601/100 100 120 11
vax4000/400 ~27 ~30 18
The spec numbers could be slightly off but the run times don't scale
to them anyway. The Alpha was running OSF/1. The Mac and pentium/linux
runs used f2c.
I would like to get a 21066a/233 board (or faster if I can scrape together
the funds) but I need to know whether this class of programs will run reasonably
well on an alpha/linux combo.
Would someone run a cut down version of the test program? I can email you
a version that should run in less than an hour (or the full blown version).
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
--Bill Noon
Northeast Regional Climate Center
Cornell University