VAX Fortran/Ultrix

[Brian Thomson]

Users of VAX UNIX f77 who can't or won't buy the new ULTRIX FORTRAN
can often get some (but, unfortunately, not all) of the added performance
just by using the new math library on their 4.2BSD systems.
		f77 [...] -lnm
uses a hand-written assembly-language library for mathematical functions
that is much faster and, in cases that I have investigated, at least as
accurate as the standard library functions.

I will report performance improvement in terms of the SPICE benchmark
results posted to the Usenet mod.vlsi group (aka INFO-VLSI at SANDIA-CAD) by
[I think] Steve Greenberg of DEC.  SPICE is a cpu-hungry circuit simulation
package out of Berkeley, and a particular sample problem was reported to
run in 1 minute 8 seconds on a 780 under VMS FORTRAN 4.0.  The corresponding
time for 4.2BSD f77 was 2:42.  Using -lnm cut this to 1:45.
-- 
		    Brian Thomson,	    CSRI Univ. of Toronto
		    {linus,ihnp4,uw-beaver,floyd,utzoo}!utcsrgv!uthub!thomson