Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!nrl-cmf!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!sri-unix!garth!smryan
From: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran follies
Summary: Oh? Vector machines.
Message-ID: <800@garth.UUCP>
Date: 24 Jun 88 23:50:16 GMT
References: <5377@cup.portal.com> <2852@mmintl.UUCP> <1005@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <701@garth.UUCP> <2157@sugar.UUCP> <777@garth.UUCP> <10757@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Reply-To: smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 28

In article <10757@ames.arc.nasa.gov> eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene N. Miya) writes:
>FYI:
>IBM 3090 is 128 32-bit elements or 64 64-bit elements.

Thankyou. I really only know about Cray and CDC machines.

>What burns me up about these figures is that some literature has IBM
>making vectors legit (e.g., didn't they invent virtual memory? ;-) "Don't mind
                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(I thought it was somebody English like Atlas)

>the man behind the curtain") and that 64-elements was determined to be
>the best length by sophisticated research (probably market rather than
>simulation).

I dislike IBM on general principles. (That is, besides being the other guy.)

So small sounds like vector registers rather than memory to memory vectors.

>4K length vectors for the 990 sound interesting.  I should go try one.

Disclaimer: this is a personal comment without very much knowledge of the
current situation:  The hardware is ready, but I am not sure those dinks
will ever get their *** together and produce a reasonable compiler.

990 is also a memory to memory vector machine. By the way 4K is also the
minimum page size for a 990. So a vector (except gather/scatter) resides
on at most two pages. Isn't that magical?