SUMMARY: Comments wanted on Intel i860

[John Rupley]

:From: rupley at cs.arizona.edu (John Rupley)
:I would appreciate any comments on use of the Intel i860 processor.
:What systems or cards were used?  What OS?  UNIX?
:What compilers?  Advice and suggestions?

Attached are responses to the above posting. 

At the high end are the Alliant systems. At the low end, various
addon boards for the ISA bus.

Not mentioned below are:

	an i860 addon card and software from:

		DSM Digital Service GmbH
			tel: (49) 89-55195-0		Munich
			tel: (408) 946-0655		Milpitas

	the Okidata 7300 workstation, which runs UNIX SysVR4 
	on an i860.

Thanks,

John Rupley
 uucp: ..{uunet | ucbvax | cmcl2 | noao}!arizona!rupley!local
 internet: rupley!local at cs.arizona.edu
 (H) 30 Calle Belleza, Tucson AZ 85716 - (602) 325-4533
 (O) Dept. Biochemistry, Univ. Arizona, Tucson AZ 85721 - (602) 621-3929

***************************RESPONSES**********************************

>From brandis at inf.ethz.ch Mon Dec 10 01:35:15 1990

NeXT uses the i860 on their high-performance graphics board for the new line
of workstations.

Alliant has a new series of parallel computers based on the i860. They run
a dialect of UNIX.

Intel has the iPSC 860, an i860 hypercube. I do not know about the environment.

There are a lot of i860 add-on boards for the PC. They have to be programmed
directly from the PC, generally through a small amount of shared memory and
a control port.

The Olivetti 486 motherboards have a socket for the i860. Now programmer inter-
face for it up to now, but some graphics applications.

There are also some american PC motherboards that contain both a 486 and an
860 (I think Hauppage has one).


Marc-Michael Brandis
Computer Systems Laboratory, ETH-Zentrum (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland
email: brandis at inf.ethz.ch

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From crouse at eng.umd.edu Mon Dec 10 15:46:57 1990

Could you send (or post) a summary or any information you receive to me?
The i860 looks very interesting but I've only seen one application
thus far.  Microway sells a coprocessor board that plugs into 
PCs.  They also have several compilers for DOS and for UNIX.
You can find their adds in any issue of PC Magazine.
The board is in the $7-9000.00 range as I recall, and that includes
one compiler.

Gil Crouse
Dept. of Aerospace Engineering
University of Maryland
crouse at eng.umd.edu
(301) 405-1140

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From bobeson at saturn.ucsc.edu Mon Dec 10 21:03:37 1990

My group is working on a shared memory i860 multiprocessor.
I like the chip.  I have used it in the form of a Wizard card,
and the Star860 development system.  The chip is fast,
alright, but of  course nowhere near as fast as Intel claims.
I am about to start working on a port of OSF/1 to the i860,
in conjunction with Intel.  If you are still interested,
drop me a note in a couple of months, and I will be able
to fill your mailbox with i860 OS info aplenty.

Bob Ellefson

----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From neray at alliant.com Thu Dec 13 08:28:39 1990

The Alliant FX/2800 is a shared memory supercomputer based on the
Intel i860. The system supports up to 28 i860 processors (@40MHz),
and 1 GB of main memory. Processors can be used for multiprocessing
(one processor per process or thread) and parallel processing (up
to 14 processors are grouped together in a cluster, dedicated to
a single process. This is supported by paallelizing Fortran and C
compilers, and hardware-based concurrency control.)

We have developed our own compilers based on the parallel and
vector technology of our first-generation systems, which were
based on a proprietary parallel vector processor. The compilers 
support the advanced instruction-level parallelism features of 
the i860 such as dual instruction mode and pipelining. These 
compilers have been licensed to Intel for eventual distribution
on other i860-based platforms.

The operating system (called Concentrix) is based on BSD4.3
with extensions for symmetric multiprocessing, disk striping, 
high-performance virtual memory, and other supercomputer-like 
features. Concentrix supports X11, NFS, NQS, DECnet, UltraNet 
and Hyperchannel.

A high-performance integrated X11 frame buffer is available as
an option.

Current performance results include:

VAX MIPS (Dhrystone V1.1): 41 VAX MIPS per processor (72,815 Dhrys/sec)

DP Whetstone (inlined): 54 MWhetstones per processor

Linpack 100 (all FORTRAN):

	- Single processor: 			 	 6.1 MFLOPS
	- Entry-Level System (4-processor cluste):	15.1 MFLOPS
	- High-End System (14-procesor cluster):	 25.7 MFLOPS

Linpack 1000:

	- Single processor:				   27 MFLOPS
	- Entry-Level System (4-pressor cluster):        86 MFLOPS
	- High-End System (14-processor cluster):         296 MFLOPS

SPECmark:

	- Single processor:					20.6
	- Entry-Level System (SPECthruput, 8 processors)	84.8
	- High-End System (SPECthruput, 28 processors)	       263.6

All figures are measured, actual results.

Entry-level systems start at $525K, including 8 processors, 64MB memory,
and 1.6GB (formatted) disk.
 

-- 
Phil Neray			Domain:	neray at alliant.com
Alliant Computer Systems	UUCP:	{mit-eddie|linus}!alliant!neray
Littleton, MA 01460		Phone:	(508) 486-1429


>From neray at alliant.com Thu Dec 13 08:17:16 1990

Please add the following to my previous mail concerning the
FX/2800:

We have also recently measured performance of 2.145 GFLOPS
on an FX/2828 for convolution. This compares to 2.012 GFLOPS
for an eight-processor Cray Y/MP ( (50,000 by 500 32-bit convolution).

The eight-processor FX/2808 also beats the the eight-processor Y/MP -
for example, a 2000 by 500 convolution performs at 575 MFLOPS
on the FX/2808 versus 546 MFLOPS for the Y/MP.

Thank you,

Phil Neray