Mainframes vs clusters

[Mike Coleman]

"Jonathan Hutchins" <hutchins at opus1.com> writes:
> Given that we're supposedly weighing mainframes against commodity/desktop
> PC's running Linux, I don't really see the PC/Linux system replacing a
> system that has four rooms full of modem/terminal/network interconnectors
> feeding under the floor to the host.

Sometime around 1995, I was working on one of those "OODB with web interface"
things that's ubiquitous now, but was very new back then.  Anyway, the main
system ran on a SPARC 2 workstation and used Apache and an OODB from Poet.

The OODB was also available for Linux, so I also did development on a tiny
486SXj-25 laptop (the 'j' means it's an extra-slow 486SX-25).

Having used Suns since the Sun3, my impression was that the SPARC 2 was a
pretty quick box.  One day, just for fun, I benchmarked the two systems just
to see how much slower my anemic laptop was.  I was quite shocked to discover
that the laptop was the faster of the two, by a significant margin (maybe 2x,
I forget).

The moral for me was to be wary of my guesses about the relative speeds of
hardware (in light of Moore's law).

-- 
Mike Coleman, mkc at mathdogs.com                                      Windows XP
http://www.mathdogs.com                                               Linux :)
problem solving, expert software development