gauging interest in VAX 6000-530

Mike Cheponis wrote: [stuff deleted] And 90s. Data is expensive to ship and dramatically more expensive to keep coherent when distributed, even across short distances and gigabit networks. If this were not the case we wouldn't see Enterprise class machines being pushed out the door, and I wouldn't be watching a client who accepted the notion of "cheap" computing clusters without stopping to think throw more and more hardware at their back-end -- what was originally a single US170E became a 2300, then a 2400, then a pair of 2400s and now a four-processor E450 and a 2400 -- all to support a handful of 500MHz NT clients who are doing all the computations. That right, no integer math, no floating point, not nuthin' on the backend except moving data around. Draw a typical "modern" distributed computing architecture on the wall, then do the same for a 360 TSO system using 3270s. Damn if the pictures don't look the same save for the labels on the boxes. The 3270 has been replaced by a thin client, and the Big Blue box has been replaced by a big-ass Enterprise 10K from Sun. Yeah, the communications links are faster, but with more processing done on the front end I generally have to ship more data more often and go through parlor tricks to keep the stuff in synch -- not an issue for passive web browsers, but then the browser is a lousy model for many applications. The bottom line here is the speed of light; at some point I need to do more things in parallel to increase my throughput. A typical PC with a single bus simply can't push as much data as a large machine with a bunch of independent dedicated buses managed by their own controllers. Of course, none of this has anything to do with the 486 integer ALU vs. a Vax 8mumble ALU -- it has to do with the overall architecture of the machine. Given a similar bus and channel controller structure one could get the same throughput out of an x86 as a Vax, MV or 309x class machine. The problem is that I can't attach equivalent hardware. Given the choice between deploying Solaris on an x86 or a sparc I'll take the x86 90+% of the time -- on the desktop the price-performance is tough to beat. However, there's simply no way that I can do it for anything that requires shuffling around large amounts of data. I can't get a PC that has enough aggregate bandwidth; an Enterprise machine will smoke the PC's doors off despite the fact that the PC is clocking hundreds of Mhz faster (aside: does anyone know offhand what the typical CPI is for the Ppro, PII and PIII?). Again, that's not a commentary on the processor, it's a commentary on the overall architecture. A Sequent, for example, has a far better architecture than any PC I can buy. That's correct. Unfortunatly, CPU speed is kinda meaningless in and of itself, save for some very degenerate applications (i.e., no I/O, no external memory references, everything resolves in on-board cache, etc.) I run Solaris on Ppros, PIIs and Sparcs, Linux on PIIIs and OpenBSD on Sparcs. The PCs are less reliable than the sparcs, but even then they're far more reliable than anything from the late 70's. If we look at contemporaries, my fuzzy recollection is that the 785 I was using was generally a hell of a lot more reliable than the PC/AT I was using at the time -- and the 785 cranked a hell of a lot harder than the AT did. Cheers, Chris -- Chris Kennedy chris(a)mainecoon.com http://www.mainecoon.com PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97