10 Apr
2026
10 Apr
'26
10:54 p.m.
On 4/10/26 16:42, Paul Koning wrote:
Very much so, yes. It takes two people to move *the power cable* for
that machine.
We at LSSM
have a 9000 in the warehouse. I doubt we will try to get it running, but you never know.
One interesting thing about the 9000 is that it's one of only two implementations
of the VAXvector that I'm aware of. We have the other, which is an add-in board for a
VAX-6400. I got that up and running about two years ago; it's a great deal of fun,
but only for FORTRAN.
Does a 9000 need 3-phase power? I did not know there were VAX vector instructions.
Yes, but only those two implementations.
The XMI board, called FV64A, will only work with 6000-400 and -500
processors, though a box can take one VAXvector XMI board per processor.
It has 16 64-bit- vector registers, vectors can be up to 64 elements
long. It crunches about 90 MFLOPS peak.
I wonder if GCC knows about them (for the VAX back
end). It has really extensive vector support, so if the back end handles that you'd
end up with vectors probably for any language GCC knows about -- or minimally for C and
C++ as well as FORTRAN.
That would be a nice extension, but sadly we can count the number of
places that can take advantage of it on one hand. And the number of
machines that implement it that are actually functional on one finger.
The VAX FORTRAN compiler will emit the vector instructions, and that
works well. Actually it works amazingly well; it autovectorizes code
every bit as well as Cray's compiler, which is really the gold standard.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA