[rescue] ID this SGI board and win, oh, I dunno, my eternal thanks

[Joshua Boyd]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2004 at 08:53:46PM -0500, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:

> I don't know how to evaluate that, actually.  From the performance
> comparisons at http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/perfcomp.html, I get
> the sense that a single R10k-195 is 2-3 times as fast as an R4k-200 in an
> Indigo2, but he doesn't have much in the multi-processor area or that's
> Challenge/Onyx-specific.  And, of course, we're talking R4k-150 in my
> Challenge, not -200.

Well, my understanding is that a single MC3 board is capable of fully
feeding 2 to 4 CPUs of either type, so for tasks that allow it, you
would likely see a linear speed up in all cases.  I strongly think that
the dual processor R10k will be strongly faster at virtually all tasks.
Plus, it supports MIPS4 built code instead of only MIPS3 built code,
which may or may not be important.

On the other hand, 4 procs is cooler, even if it isn't faster.  Perhaps
it would be best to sell the R10k board you have and hope someday to
find a quad R10k for a reasonable price.  I think there might be some
list members who might consider selling 1 from their machines.
 
> However, I don't know how much "general computing" stuff uses more than one
> processor, or, indeed, how that would affect things at all.

"General computing" likely won't take advantage of multiple CPUs so
well.  However, I thought this machine was for doing non-general
computing?  BTW, database software should scale well, but I don't know
if Postgres or MySQL actually do scale well in this manner or not.

Shell scripting will also take advantage of multiple CPUs, and with
care, you can maximize this to good advantage for certain types of
processing tasks. 

Plus, SGI has all sorts of nice tools for doing parallel development,
and I'd imagine they are most fun the more processors you have.