Mainframes vs clusters

[Jonathan Hutchins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mike Coleman [mailto:mkc at mathdogs.com]
> I was quite shocked to discover
> that the laptop was the faster of the two, by a significant 
> margin (maybe 2x, I forget).

But were you really running an equivalent environment on each, ie plain
single-session console with no servers or deamons in the background (or at
least the same/equivalent ones)?  

I'd be willing to bet that you could do just about as well in an xterm
window on the Sparc, while trying to load XWindows and KDE on the laptop
would bring it to it's knees - but that could be the same kind of erroneous
assumption:

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

Yep.