performance of VAX/780/750 Pyramid & SUN (longish)

[smh at SRI-PRISM.ARPA]

From:  "Scott M. Hinnrichs" <smh at SRI-PRISM.ARPA>

	I was pleased at the results these comparison benchmarks came
up with so I requested a copy from Partha to run on our Pyramid 90x.
	Needless to say, we came up with similar results.
	Partha (at SUNY) did not say what the configuration of the
Pyramid (or VAX, or SUN) were, but I was anxious to see how our 90X
faired.  We have 8 meg of memory, a Data-cache, 2 swap devices, and
the O/Sx 2.3 release software (which can all make a difference in
performance measurements).
	Here are the results of running Partha's benchmarks on our
Pyramid 90x vs. his results.  We were running an incremental dump at
the time.  We also have a program (nice 20) running all the time
computing pi to 10,000,000 places soaking up spare cpu.  :-)

1) C-CARD
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	 2.6s		   0.0s		    2s
Pyramid (SUNY)	 3.4s		   0.1s		    4s
VAX-11/780	 6.8s		   0.1s		    --
VAX-11/750	13.3s		   0.1s		   14s
SUN		13.9s		   0.1s		   14s

2) P-CARD
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	 2.6s		   0.0s		    2s
Pyramid (SUNY)	 3.4s		   0.1s		    4s
VAX-11/780	23.2s		   1.0s		    --
VAX-11/750	32.5s		   0.4s		   33s
SUN		41.0s		   0.4s		   42s

3) GREP
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	  2.6s		  0.4s		    3s
Pyramid (SUNY)	  3.3s		  0.5s		    4s
VAX-11/780	  3.4s		  0.8s		    --
VAX-11/750	  6.8s		  0.9s		    8s
SUN		  6.8s		  0.9s		    8s

4) SWAP
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	  4.8s		   2.8s		 0:08s (!)
Pyramid (SUNY)	  5.4s		   5.9s		 0:58s
VAX-11/780	 13.6s		  11.5s		 -----
VAX-11/750	 22.7s		  23.1s		 1:30s
SUN		 33.1s		 158.0s		 5:56s


High-Load Tests

	The high-load tests were fun.  While the 5 process SWAP test
was going I attempted to run emacs.  It took 16 seconds for emacs to
load my .emacs_pro.mo and read in /etc/termcap (usually takes 3
seconds).  After emacs came up it was quite responsive and there did
not seem to be any delay in screen updating.  Even though the 90X
shines on individual benchmarks, I think the real benefit we have
found is responsiveness under (simulated) heavy loads.

1) C-CARD  (20 processes)
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	  2.6s		   0.0s		  0:47s (!)
Pyramid (SUNY)	  3.4s		   0.1s		  1:04s
VAX-11/780	  6.8s		   0.2s		  2:15s
VAX-11/750	 13.4s		   0.4s		  4:37s
SUN		 16.0s		   0.6s		  5:28s

2) P-CARD  (20 processes)
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	  2.6s		   0.0s		    46s (!)
Pyramid (SUNY)	  3.4s		   0.1s		  1:06s
VAX-11/780		     --  No Data --
VAX-11/750	 33.5s		   0.6s		 11:10s
SUN		 47.8s		   3.9s		 16:00s

3) GREP  (20 processes)
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
Pyramid (SRI)	  2.6s		  0.4s		    48s (!)
Pyramid (SUNY)	  4.0s		  0.5s		  1:20s
VAX-11/780	  3.5s		  0.9s		  1:20s
VAX-11/750	  7.0s		  0.8s		  2:45s
SUN		  7.5s		  1.4s		  2:50s

4) SWAP  (N processes)
		User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed Time
SRI (3 procs)     4.9s		   6.3s		   2:25s
SUNY(3 procs)     5.9s		   6.0s		   2:30s
VAX-11/780(")    14.0s		  14.0s		   3:40s
VAX-11/750(")	 23.5s		  23.1s		   4:26s
SUN		 35.6s		 104.0s		  13:00s

SRI (5 procs)     4.9s		   6.7s		   4:17s  (Max 10 procs)
SUNY(5 procs)	  5.9s		   6.0s		   4:17s  (Max  5 procs)
VAX-11/780(")		    -- Pooped out --		  (Max  3 procs)

	From these tests it is obvious that there is an advantage to
the Data-Cache, an additional swap device, and 8 Meg of memory.
	The final results of this test gave similar results to 2 other
benchmark suites we have run here.  The overall average performance of
the Pyramid 90x approaches 2.6 x VAX-11/780.  Worst case I have found
since installing the Data-Cache was 1.26 x VAX-11/780, and the best is
4.8 x VAX-11/780 (former was a Prolog Interpreter, the latter was
passing a single int parameter on a 10e+06 iteration).
	Until Pyramid comes out with their GPIO hardware for speeding
up (disk) I/O the machine will not realize it's full potential.
	One question for Partha, what happened to the data for the
VAX-11/780 on many of the tests?

	We will soon be unleashing our entire user community on the
90X; I will try to give some reasonable impressions of the results.

Scott M. Hinnrichs
SRI International
smh at sri-prism, sri-unix!sri-prism!smh