[clug] IBM announcement

Robert Edwards Robert.Edwards at anu.edu.au
Mon Apr 25 08:34:30 GMT 2005


*sigh*

> On Mon, 2005-04-25 at 16:44 +1000, Robert Edwards wrote:
>>
>> That's not really fair. Two out of six labs have 1.7GHz Celerons (2.3
>> years
>> old) and the other four labs have 2.6GHz HT P4s. What is so *crappy*
>> about
>> that? What other Universities in Oz have Linux labs at all, let alone
>> with
>> that sort of fire-power for students? Do you _really_ think that 120
>> X-terminal's hanging off of a 4-way Power5 box would give the same
>> per-user
>> performance as 120 1.7GHz or 2.6GHz CPUs, one per display, each with 256
>> or
>> 512MB of local RAM and with local disk?
>
> True, it isn't.  I must admit here to being biased against x86 (and also
> Intel), considering that the 8086 processor was an experiment by IBM to
> see how cheap they
> could make a processor, and that they published the
> specs free of charge is a pretty fair indication that they knew that
> quality had suffered greatly from this.  Also, I have never been
> impressed with a Celeron in terms of it-hasn't crawled-to-a-halt-yet
> value.
> An awful lot of Universities in Oz have Linux labs, say for example the
> Uni of Wollongong, that recently disbanded Windows for running
> exclusively Linux labs for their first year students.  If I understand
> correctly, it's following those (2004?) first years through their Uni
> career so that they won't have to choice to use Windows in their labs
> there.  Of course, if you want to compare us to UC, sure, they don't
> have them.
> Thanks for making me feel gypped, by the way, as I've always been in a
> lab with Celerons since those were introduced.  Here was I wondering why
> people were thanking the new speediness when I personally found the
> setup with the SunRays to be faster.
> As for the terminals, actually, I could believe it.  Remember about
> high-bandwidth I/O and memory channels?  Oh, wait, Intel and other 80x86
> based processors don't have them....  Heck, even Macs do better
> (Theoretically much better since the G5, but I'm yet to get my hands on
> one of them and test it out personally).  The POWER servers, on the
> other hand, make your average SGI visualisation server look like a toy
> in that regard.
>
>>
>> I don't think that the HIC box you refer to is supporting all the
>> desktops
>> on everyone's desk in the HIC.
>>
>
> No, but it *is* handling one point several million database transactions
> per hour.  Note that there is no way I know of to support that many
> (thousands of, I can't remember the exact number) Windows (2k) boxes off
> a few servers that are that far away, and especially not from a zSeries
> mainframe, which not even NT4 would run on.
> And now I must argue against my own previous paragraph by pointing out
> that one thing it does do is serve a fair number more than 120 operator,
> sysprogs, etc, running 3270 terminal emulators straight to it.  True, it
> takes a lot less processing to do than running X clients for that many
> people, but it still does it with no hiccups.
>
>
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