Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!bbn!oberon!sm.unisys.com!aero!venera.isi.edu!cracraft
From: cracraft@venera.isi.edu (Stuart Cracraft)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: GNU Emacs on Cray X/MP?
Keywords: overkill inefficient
Message-ID: <6171@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 29 Aug 88 14:48:23 GMT
References: <523@nikhefh.hep.nl> <20463@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> <588@fcs280s.ncifcrf.gov>
Reply-To: cracraft@venera.isi.edu.UUCP (Stuart Cracraft)
Organization: Information Sciences Institute, Univ. of So. California
Lines: 31

In article <588@fcs280s.ncifcrf.gov> shore@ncifcrf.gov (Melinda Shore) writes:
>In article <20463@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
>>The Cray vector architecture has fairly poor handling of character I/O
>>and interrupts/context switches, at least in the conventional UNIX
>>sense.
>
>Not to mention no VM and poor performance swapping large processes.
>While the trend on interactive systems is to optimize user performance
>(as opposed to machine performance), you probably don't want to sink
>your Cray just to run emacs.

Cray will never have VM. Trying to fit every Unix process into Cray
main memory and swapping out whenever one or two people type a character
to service the interactive processes is tantamount to disaster.

In fact, this is being noticed. Whenever two or three compute-bound
processes are running under Unicos, the interactive users go totally
unserviced for periods ranging as long as several minutes; it is
questionable whether tuning parameters, using a better scheduler, or
even increasing main memory will fundamentally change this.

Face it folks! The Cray ain't a Unix timesharing system. It's going
to be interesting to see as more and more Crays switch to Unicos
whether the system will be turned into a batch environment and
logins disallowed since the interactive response is so poor.

Give me a high-end Vax Unix/Ultrix any day for interactive work.

Or better yet, a Toshiba T5100 laptop portable running Unix!

	Stuart