Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!rutgers!njin!gould From: gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould) Newsgroups: comp.os.misc Subject: Re: character-at-a-time I/O (was Re: Re^2: Unix bigotry) Summary: Fighter planes and supercomputers are the same... Message-ID: Date: 20 Feb 89 17:40:03 GMT References: <4434@freja.diku.dk> <5900004@hpfcdc.HP.COM> <3472@sugar.uu.net> Organization: NJ InterCampus Network, New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 49 In article <3472@sugar.uu.net>, karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes: > > While fighter planes are optimized for performance, they are missing many > amenities like bathrooms, movies and in-flight meal and beverage service. > If you want to go as fast as possible, you have to give up amenities. If one > had to spend eight hours a day, five days a week (or more) traveling in an > airplane, one might quickly come to desire almost anything over an F-16. > At this point of your text, I agree with where you were going. It is exactly right that people will select a system architecture and operating system to fill a particular need. I also agree that in most cases, the CPU should be wasted rather than the more costly programmer or user. Then you go on to: > > And finally, there is *the challenge* to mainframes. How much (in scalar MIPS) > faster is a Cyber 20x than a fast MIPS M2000 like the DECstation 3100? Just a > few times, right, like less than ten? A Cyber costs several dozen times more, Well, here you go off the deep-end. Supercomputers are very different from other systems, not just because they use vector processing, but because the performance of the program to the USER is much more important than the cost of the programmer. In engineering and scientific applications that require a supercomputer, the breakthroughs (or lack of) generated by computational science outweigh the cost of the supercomputer, software, and support staff by an order of magnitude. The cycles are the only thing that becomes important, and in many cases faster supercomputers aren't available. In any case, the cost of having a programmer live with COS, or VSOS is far lower than the cost of upgrading a system to handle the 20% cycle loss from UNICOS (much worse from ETA UNIX). Yes, I see a contradiction here. If the cycles are so important, why not get more supercomputers? The real reason has to do with normal corporate and government politics. Management often doesn't agree with my argument about the cycles being all important, but the user and support staff do. In the ideal world, everyone has enough cycles. In a better-than-this world the users have enough cycles. In a terrible world, the programmers have more cycles than the users. --> Any disclaimers, made by me or by anyone on my behalf, may or may not accurately represent my representation of myself or others. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Brian Jay Gould :: INTERNET gould@jvnca.csc.org BITNET gould@jvncc - - UUCP rutgers!njin!gould Telephone (201) 329-9616 - ------------------------------------------------------------------------s