Compaq TestDrive
Today I decided to look at as many runtimes for CIA as I could reasonably afford to do. To start, we had the ISP vs. sparky, and that's a good place to start because I believe the ISP was running a dual Pentium III/600MHz machine so I don't need to even try to run CIA on anything else in my office. What I decided to do next was to check out the Compaq TestDrive systems where I could easily have temporary access to a lot of different hardware - most importantly to some fast Alpha machines to see if I can get the runtimes in the 30 sec. range.
Once you sign up, you get a simple shell account, and that's about it. It's enough for me as they are nice enough to install almost every package in RedHat 7 including PostgreSQL, GTK and all the development libraries. This means that the build on the ES40 took very little time, but I was surprised to see that the execution speed of the compiler wasn't faster than the ISP's dual 600 PIII... maybe it's true that Alpha's are excellent at floating point, but not anything great at general computation. We'll have to see.
The ES40 had a problem mounting the /house home directories, so the testing has been put on hold and I sent in an email about the problem. I'm all ready to do the testing when the mount point is re-established, and then compare this to the runs I did yesterday. I have no idea if it'll be any faster, but Compaq didn't have any faster PIII systems.
OK... they got the mount points working and I was able to run CIA on the ES40 Alpha system - what Compaq says is their highest powered machine in the Test Drive program. It seems right as it's got at least 8GB of RAM - probably more. Wow! Anyway, here are the numbers:
| Machine | User CPU (sec) |
System (sec) |
Elapsed (mm:ss) |
| sparky | 244 | 1 | 4:06 |
| www.cellanalysis.com | 68.8 | 1 | 1:38 |
| ES40 (4x667MHz) | 33.4 | 0.13 | 0:35.9 |
This shows that if we spend a bundle, it's possible to get the servicing times in the 30 sec. range. My guess is that the ES40 is at least $30,000 - but that's just a guess. It's one of their top alpha machines, and it shows. Nice times.