From: eric@tantalus.nrl.navy.mil (Eric Youngdale) Subject: Re: Is Linux a viable OS for a stable multiuser unix system, not just a hobbiest's Unix box? Date: Wed, 10 Feb 1993 19:40:41 GMT
In article <ig25.729294528@fg30> ig25@fg30.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de (Thomas Koenig) writes:
>Depends... if your applications require > 16 Meg real RAM and SCSI
>drivers, go for the SPARC. If you are going to add gigabyte storage,
>use the SPARC as woll. If your plans are not as ambitious, I'd say
>Linux is a viable alternative.
I feel that this should probably be qualified a bit. First of all,
the current scsi drivers are quite capable with dealing with machines that have
more than 16Mb. There is a slight overhead as the disk blocks are copied to
memory locations < 16Mb, but other than a barely noticable performance hit, it
will work just fine.
If I were going to try and set up a machine for number crunching, I
would probably go with either local bus or EISA for the disk controller. We
have two machines here that we use for moderate number crunching with SVr4, and
both have EISA motherboards. At the time we bought the machines the EISA disk
controllers were still quite expensive, so we went with ISA controllers - it
may not be the best, but we have an easy upgrade path available to us if the
need arises.
>>Has anyone else considered these tradeoffs?
>
>Yep... I have :-)
So have I. When we made the choice (~2-3 years ago), linux was not
available, so we went with SVr4. At the time, there was a real price premium
for 483-33 machines, and I think that a loaded system with SVr4 went for around
10K$. A stripped EISA machine went for around 5K$. We could have gotten an
entry level Sparc machine for around 20K$ (stripped it would have been around
10K$), but as I recall the price/performance ratios were about the same for the
two machines, in terms of number crunching.
-Eric
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