Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site pucc-h Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!inuxc!pur-ee!CS-Mordred!Pucc-H:ab3 From: ab3@pucc-h (Darth Wombat) Newsgroups: net.micro Subject: Re: IBM vs VAX/unix Message-ID: <571@pucc-h> Date: Fri, 2-Mar-84 01:05:59 EST Article-I.D.: pucc-h.571 Posted: Fri Mar 2 01:05:59 1984 Date-Received: Sat, 3-Mar-84 09:47:52 EST Organization: Purdue University Computing Center Lines: 42 William Pearsonhas compared the performance of an IBM-PC with a Vax running unix for an application that (as far as I can tell) involves large amounts of string pattern matching and correlation... and says: "I am now tempted to think of "1/2 of a VAX" as simply 3 IBM-PC's." For your task, it certainly looks like the IBM-PC is a cost-effective way to do your computing...and we could go round and round arguing about relative compiler efficiencies and use of native instruction sets and so on, but consider the point given. The problem that this has touched in my mind is that your experience is the sort of thing that lots of university computer honchos get stuck on about the time that get Mac-attacked or PC-ized or whatever...and the is not comparable to a Vax running Unix for a very large class of tasks commonly done around places like this; for example, I (and about 40 other people in a graduate class) are doing massive amounts of image processing/analysis in Lisp -- and I just can't see this stuff running on a personal computer. Not to mention one colleague working on simulating Lisp running on a parallel machine, or another doing diffraction tomography computations -- or the hordes of undergraduates burning up the floating point units running Spice (a circuit simulator/modeler). Why the near-flame? I (often) question the wisdom of those who are so enthralled with these cute little micros which are fine for teaching Pascal, or acclimatizing people to computers, or even running smaller applications, that they forget that a large number of us *need* megaflops... We have something like 2 dozen vaxes at Purdue, 3 CDC 6000-series mainframes, a Cyber 205 supercomputer, and numerous other species of machines ranging from 11/23's to 11/750's, and nearly all of them run flat out from 8 a.m. to well past midnight six days a week, and (later in the semesters) sometimes more than that. What are we going to do with a dozen IBM-PC's or twenty Mac's that will *really* help this situation? -- "Oh dear...I believe you'll find that reality is on the blink again." Darth Wombat UUCP: { allegra, decvax, ihnp4, harpo, seismo, teklabs, ucbvax } !pur-ee!rsk