Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!labrea!agate!pasteur!ames!hc!beta!dzzr
From: dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Troubles
Message-ID: <15762@beta.UUCP>
Date: 18 Feb 88 23:41:53 GMT
References: <6908@sol.ARPA>
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 59
Summary: Symbolics vs. Suns

In article <6908@sol.ARPA>, miller@ACORN.CS.ROCHESTER.EDU (Brad Miller) writes:


The discussion was about the processing speeds of a Symbolics 3650 vs
a 3670.

> Slower? I thought it was about 1.4x *faster*. 

Our benches show the 3650 to be ~20% slower than a 3570.


> And a 16MB 3620 (the same
> processor, but slower disks, diffo cabinet) would only set you back about
> $55k. *NOT* diskless. 

Our benches showed that the Symbolics 3620 suffered severe performance
(speed) degradation as garbage collection progressed, because of its
slow Winchester drives. Initially, the 3620 ran approximately as fast
as a 3600, but as GC and paging demand increased performance rapidly
dropped off to the point that a benchmark run took 45% longer on the
3620 than on the 3600.  Thus the reason for comparison between a
Symbolics 3650 and a Sun 3/260: equivalent run times.


> If you are going to compare to a SUN, then add disks
> to the machine. Or count some fraction of the cost of your sever and
> remember that you are paging over the net. 

Ok. Four user Sun system:
	Sun 3/280 Server w/2 280 MB drives   ~74,600
	4 - 3/260 diskless, 16MB            ~143,200
	Total                                217,800 (Ignore misc 
							cables, etc.)

	Cost / user: 54,450

    Four user Symbolics 3650 configuration (believe me, the 3620 is
not sufficient for large KEE applications).

	Cost / user: 75,000

    So far, paging over the net with our Suns hasn't hurt us. We don't
have any numbers yet, but it's beginning to appear that 1 server can
handle 7 - 8 diskless clients running large LISP images before it will
start to bog down. 


> Lets face it, you can't make a lispm out of a box that is running
> UNIX. 

Have you *seen* SPE yet? (I kind of doubt it. We're beta testers,
so there can't be too many people outside of Sun familiar with it.) 
It's pretty damn close to a LISPM.


------------------------------------------------------------------------
Doug Roberts
Los Alamos National Laboratory
dzzr@lanl.gov