Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lll-winken!vette!brooks
From: brooks@vette.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <35986@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 17 Oct 89 01:18:18 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <127@csinc.UUCP> <33802@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 15

In article <33802@ames.arc.nasa.gov> lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Hugh LaMaster) writes:
>I will make a reverse claim:  People who want status symbols buy PC's for their
>office.  These PC's, the last time I checked, were only 1/1000th as cost
>effective at doing scientific computations as supercomputers.  Talk about 
>*waste*...  :-)
A "PC" with a MIPS R3000 or an Intel i860 in it is about 70 times more cost
effective for scalar codes, and we run a lot of those on our supercomputers
at LLNL, and about 3 to 7 times more cost effective for highly vectorized codes.
In fact, much to our computer center's dismay, research staff are voting with
their wallet and buying these "PC"s in droves.  Our computer center is responding
by buying microprocessor powered machines, currently in bus based shared memory
multiprocessor form, but eventually in scalable shared memory multiprocessor form.


brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp