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Evaluation Workshop encourages contact
London, 14 November 97
The 8th Workstation Evaluation Workshop was held at Daresbury Laboratories, UK, on 11-12 November 1997. This workshop, followed the format of previous years and was intended to encourage close contact between the research communities from Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics and Materials and the major vendors of workstations, software and peripherals.The Conference also had an exhibition attached to it with most of the major HPC vendors represented.
Dr. Martyn Guest from Daresbury, presented a large collection of benchmark results from last year's event, covering systems from workstations to the top end supercomputers such as the NEC SX4 and MPPs such as the Cray T3E system. The analysis is very comprehensive and provided a backcloth for this year's workshop. This was followed by a dozen major vendors which made 30-minute presentations on topics such as hardware, compilers, graphics, storage, networking etc. Products described ranged from the Fujitsu VPP700 vector machine, the SGI Origin 2000, the Cray T3E, the HP/9000 using PA8500 chips, the Convex Exemplar, the Digital HPC range using Alpha chips and many other parallel or distributed computers. High Performance Workstations and servers as well as software ranging from the NAG library, the AVS products, to the Linux operating system were also described.
A very important component of the workshop was the availability of systems for benchmarking evaluation purposes. Vendors allowed Internet access to their systems for evaluating products during the workshop. In addition Daresbury made available loaned systems for evaluation from 3rd November.
Attendance
About 100 people attended - most of them scientists/engineers from UK academia and industry. The workshop was very interesting with many new systems which are expected to be announced in the next few months alluded to. Another important aspect is that vendors I talked to were very pleased with the quality of the enquiries they were getting from delegates.
Best performing workstation
The workstation with the highest Specfp95 rating (25.8), at present, is from IBM. This is despite the fact that it uses a relatively low speed chip, the IBM RS6000/397, of only 160MHz. It apparently beat competitor machines with 300-500 MHz chips in their systems, to take first place for the present. Preliminary results show the RS6000/397 implemented in the High Performance SP2 product to be a likely winner in sustained performance in this class of machines too. Once the results of this workshop are properly evaluated Primeur plans to publish a summary, so watch this space.
Further Information
The workshop was very successful and smoothly run thanks to the Daresbury staff. They are also organising an HPCI conference and exhibition at UMIST in Manchester, UK on 12-14 January 1998. Those interested in the use of HPCN should make an effort to attend. It is likely to be very informative and most HPCN vendors will be exhibiting.
Full details visit the Daresbury Web at:www.dl.ac.uk/TCSC/HPCI/conference ">HPCI-UK at UMIST
Chris Lazou
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