Re: Which Machine for swarm: Pentium Pro, or SUN Ultra 140?

[Brian Haugh]

We have found that our Swarm application runs faster on a Pentium Pro
than on a Sun Ultra 1/140. Unfortunately, Swarm can't take any
advantage of the Ultra's 64 bit architecture since the gcc Objective-C
compiler does not compile for it. Of course you can compile with
gcc on an UltraSparc with gcc, but the code is no different from
a regular Sparc. Thus, the main difference in performance is just
due to clock speed - since the Pro's clock is faster than an Ultra 1 at
140 Mhz, then the code run's faster. Our app runs at about the same
speed on a Ultra Enterprise 2 200Mhz server as the Pentium Pro, but
the Ultra 2 is a bit more expensive.

So, if Swarm performance is the only consideration, I would recommend
the Pentium Pro under Linux. If you are going to use the system for
other applications, though, the Ultra might have some advantages.
The Ultra is especially fast on multi-media, i.e., video compression/
decompression, from what I've read, due to special parallel execution
for MPEG instructions.

Brian

-- 
Brian A. Haugh, Ph.D.

Institute for Defense Analyses
Computer & Software Engineering Division
1801 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22311-1772

phone: (703) 845-6678
fax:   (703) 845-6788
email: address@hidden


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