Where's the SPARK in my SPARC????

[David Vinayak Wallace]

   Date: 21 Feb 91 17:00:49 GMT
   From: corkum at csri.toronto.edu (Brent Thomas Corkum)

   We have 2 4D/25's and have just recieved a new SUN SPARCstation 2
   GX in order to port some C code from the Iris to the Sun. Our code
   is a boundary element stress analysis program, similar to finite
   elements in that you assemble a matrix and solve it etc. Anyways, I
   ported my code, had to thange it to K&R from Ansi because the
   default compiler that comes with the SUN doesn't support Ansi
   (yet!!). So I compiled the program and ran it, and did I get a
   surprise, it ran 6.5 times slower than the 4D/25. I thought the
   SPARC2 was suppose to be 2-3 times faster in FLOPS.

You should use gcc which is faster then the supplied Sun compiler and
is ANSI to boot!  I don't know if it'll be 6.5 time faster though;
you'll have to play with the optimiser switches.

Kudos to SGI's compiler folks by the way.