[HECnet] Re: Alpha Chip performance

On 11 Apr 2026, at 18:47, Mark Matlock <mark(a)matlockfamily.com> wrote: I posted some old benchmark data I found on various PDP-11s and VAXes that I collected down through the years. Johnny mentioned he thought the 11/84 numbers looked off and I thought so too. So I reran the 11/84 tests as well as the 11/83 tests and the results are below. Also, the VAXes did not have Floating Point accelerators since they belonged to our corporate I.T. group who preferred to compute with integers. System Sieve Flops Sieve Float Dhrystones (Sec) VUPS. VUPS PDP 11/23 2.027900 9693 .11 .05 PDP 11/24 11500 .06 PDP 11/44 .568600 61473 .39 .33 PDP 11/73 .319948 38837 .69 .21 833 PDP 11/83 .241563 359416 .92 1.92 1153 PDP 11/84 .236615 365645 .94 1.95 1200 M100-04 .218359 382592 1.02 2.04 1250 VAX 11/780 .222200 187135 1.00 1.00 1500 uVAX II .259100 144829 .86 .77 VAX 8600 .059300 1035673 3.75 5.53 VAX 8700 .044920 885201 4.95 4.73 VAX 6420 .032160 1412804 6.91 7.55 17141 VAX 6610 .007305 9230000 30.42 49.32 66578 VAX 3500 .084370 525590 2.63 2.81 5612 MV3100 10e .057030 766470 3.90 4.10 8834 MV3100 30 .038906 1132743 5.71 6.05 15974 MV3100 80 .022187 1987578 10.01 10.62 22727 VS4000 90A .007289 9270000 30.48 49.54 66578 Alpha 666Mhz .000340 204000000 653.53 1090 2783964 Paul commented on the Alpha’s performance that came from my XP1000 (BLISH on HECnet) workstation. It reminded me of a couple passages in the book “A Life Decoded” by Craig Venter who led the private effort to sequence the human genome. I thought this group might enjoy a couple passages from the book. I had lunch with Craig Venter at my lab when we licensed some technology from one of his companies, Synthetic Genomics, where I first learned about the role of Alphas in the Human Genome Project. Best, Mark To make sense of the claims and counterclaims by the competing computer manufacturers, I decided to do an experiment with the assembler that was being used routinely for sequencing at TIGR. With the Sun computers that we ran it on, a simple (relative to human) genome such as Haemophilus required several days to assemble. By extrapolation, it would require years for it to assemble the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome. How would our various suitors do in coming up with more efficient hardware? Only Compaq and IBM agreed to the challenge. In the first run of Compaq’s Alpha chip, we went from taking days to nineteen hours, and then finally nine hours. The best that IBM could manage was thirty-six hours. My programmers wanted the Alpha chip and the results of the challenge left no doubt that was the one to go with. IBM knew it had not done well and asked me what it would take to get the contract. I bluntly told them that IBM would have to provide the system for free and include a development team to get it up and running. While IBM was contemplating my reply, it dawned on me that I might not have made a particularly good proposal: I had no leverage if the system was free, and I could hardly withhold a payment for poor performance. I realized that I had to pay for what I really wanted, for what had the best chance to work in an area that no one had ever been before. The CEO of Compaq flew out to meet with me and to pledge his commitment to make every effort to guarantee the success of our effort. He wanted his computers to be the ones that carried out the largest calculation in the history of biology and medicine to date. After a few days I signed the Compaq contract and called the CEO to tell him that I had accepted his offer. A half an hour later I was about to phone Nick at IBM to give him my decision when he called me instead. He had just met Lou Gerstner, the IBM CEO, who authorized him to provide the entire system gratis. I responded that I would have been interested thirty minutes earlier but had just signed the deal with Compaq. He wished me well and said that when the Compaq computers failed, they would be waiting. But I could not let his offer even enter my head, for I could not countenance failure: For this project there were no second chances. …. With its Compaq Alpha chip the Celera computer could top around 1.2 teraflops (teraops), equivalent to 1.2 trillion calculations per second. The computer also had 4 gigabytes of RAM and around 10 terabytes, or ten thousand gigabytes, of hard disk storage space. Peterson’s team would come to be incredibly proud of what they had built and the speed with which they accomplished it, an unprecedented achievement in the computer world of the day. In 1999 our computer was rated by Compaq engineers as the third largest in the world and the largest computer in civilian hands. (Today it would not be in the top few hundred, and even PCs can accommodate 64 gigabytes of RAM.) Overseeing all this would be a Star Trek–style control room where giant wall screens and dozens of smaller computer displays tracked the CPU utilization, the computer room temperature, who was in the facility, CNN, the weather, the state of Internet traffic, the 300 ABI 3700 DNA sequencers, the power grid, the extent of database use by each subscriber, and, for the sake of Tony White, the Celera stock price. Venter, J. Craig. A Life Decoded: My Genome: My Life (Function). Kindle Edition. _______________________________________________ HECnet mailing list -- hecnet(a)lists.dfupdate.se To unsubscribe send an email to hecnet-leave(a)lists.dfupdate.se