Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!steinmetz!davidsen
From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Cray 2 has 2GW address
Message-ID: <9720@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: 29 Feb 88 14:51:56 GMT
References: <9495@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <3815@megaron.arizona.edu> <235@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> <416@micropen>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 30

In article <416@micropen> dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) writes:
|  [...]
| I know most of these CRAYs are used in DoD research on important things like
| bombs and SDI, but my running an EDITOR (ie. slow interactive process)
| on a CRAY--presumably payed for with my tax dollars.  Ouch!  Can't you
| find any good emacs for a VT100 on a VAX11/780 to run twenty editor jobs?
| (I bet every government facility has tons of workhorse CPU for editor
| sessions rather than that premium CRAY time.)

In the 50's the idea was to maximize use of the CPU, because it was
expensive.  The cost performance of all hardware has dropped, and the
price of software has gone up.  The investment of 2-4 minutes of a
programmer or engineer or physicist's time to move the file to a
"suitable" machine, edit, and move it back is simply not cost effective
as compared with doing short edits on the target machine.

When we first got Cray2 access the administrators didn't want to support
editors. Our argument was that we were paying for the resources and
wanted to use the CPU cycles as we saw fit. We now have a number of
editors on the Cray2, including MicroEMACS, and we feel that it is a
good investment on our part. The edits use a tiny fraction of the total
CPU and memory k-sec we need, and improve the productivity of software
developers.

I agree that the idea of using a Cray2 as an editor is intuitively poor,
but after consideration it is quite cost effective.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {uunet | philabs | seismo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me