Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 14:19:28 03/15/98
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On March 15, 1998 at 15:23:01, Giovanni Lavorgna wrote: >On March 14, 1998 at 10:53:05, Robert Hyatt wrote: >.......... >>It is *almost* done. If I didn't have to do a two-day unix training >>seminar Monday and Tuesday it would probably be playing on ICC >>wednesday. >> >>My quad-pro box shipped yesterday, supposedly. It should arrive on >>Monday >>or tuesday, if all goes well (4 pentium pro 200 cpus, 256 mb, 12 gigs of >>wide scsi disks (2x2gig, 2x4gig). That's why I have been working on >>this >>so hard. >> >>I've completed the necessary data structures to implement the Cray-Blitz >>parallel search. The program still works, although about 2% slower now. >>(this was the hardest part of the procedure, btw). I have most of the >>pthread code done, and only lack a couple of pieces of code before I am >>ready to start testing... >> >>I chose to use posix threads, because there's a good chance it can be >>ported to NT with little effort. > >Hi Bob. Could you give us an idea if this system you chose is more >convenient/expensive than a Unix high-end workstation? If I recall it >correctly you chose to use in Paris a fast alpha workstation, but now >you seem to prefer this other system set-up. Also, what kind of Unix you >can ran on these boxes? >Thanks in advance. > For a real event, I'd hunt for the fastest thing that is legal, since speed is still important. For my development, we were replacing all of our sun workstations with new ultra-sparc machines. I chose to not get a new sun, and, instead, search for a reasonable multiprocessor platform. I wanted 4 "heads" so that I could do reasonable algorithm development on it. I settled on a machine known as the "quad-6 (quad P6)" from ALR. The bare machine, with 256mb of ECC SDRAM, plus 4 pentium pro processors, costs right at $11,000... no disks at all. I'm taking my current disks (3 2gb ultra scsi drives, plus two new 4 gig ultra scsi drives [another 1100 bucks for the two 4's] to this new machine. Therefore, using my old 21" monitor, I will have a grand total of $12,000 in this machine. I use linux, and am currently running the 2.0.33 SMP kernel on the PII/300. I will run that on the new quad-6 machine when it arrives, early this week. I am using Posix threads, which should port to most SMP unix flavors like Dec's unix plus linux for the alpha. I don't yet know about NT, but have a couple of people that will look into threads there once I get the first version going this week... I'll describe the first version a little later, but I finally decided that I couldn't abandon N years of work spent on the Cray Blitz parallel search. But I did refine the idea significantly as I laid things out this time around. It looks promising... >Giovanni Lavorgna
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