Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!uunet!shelby!neon!neon!gumby
From: gumby@Cygnus.COM (David Vinayak Wallace)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: Where's the SPARK in my SPARC????
Message-ID: <GUMBY.91Feb21124908@Cygnus.COM>
Date: 21 Feb 91 17:49:08 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.120049.5626@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
Organization: Cygnus Support
Lines: 19
In-Reply-To: corkum@csri.toronto.edu's message of 21 Feb 91 17:00:49 GMT


   Date: 21 Feb 91 17:00:49 GMT
   From: corkum@csri.toronto.edu (Brent Thomas Corkum)

   We have 2 4D/25's and have just recieved a new SUN SPARCstation 2
   GX in order to port some C code from the Iris to the Sun. Our code
   is a boundary element stress analysis program, similar to finite
   elements in that you assemble a matrix and solve it etc. Anyways, I
   ported my code, had to thange it to K&R from Ansi because the
   default compiler that comes with the SUN doesn't support Ansi
   (yet!!). So I compiled the program and ran it, and did I get a
   surprise, it ran 6.5 times slower than the 4D/25. I thought the
   SPARC2 was suppose to be 2-3 times faster in FLOPS.

You should use gcc which is faster then the supplied Sun compiler and
is ANSI to boot!  I don't know if it'll be 6.5 time faster though;
you'll have to play with the optimiser switches.

Kudos to SGI's compiler folks by the way.


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