Originally Posted by
skyshack
I never got really excited by performance. Just utterly pissed at lack of performance.
I've had access to a HPC that when commissioned was on the TOPS500 list ..... for 3 months. My largest FEA results file was 330Gb, took Abaqus 24 hours to do that analysis, then it took 24 hours to get the file back to my desktop. There was a bit of wet string doing semaphore in the network between my desk and the HPC.
My work desktop was dual Xeon 16 cores, 64Gb ram, 3Tb raid 0, 1GHz network.
In the past and former life before I was a stress and lifing technologist I was a CAD technician and for 1 year a network tech at a college. First thing I had to do as network tech was convert a "star" co-ax 10base2 network with 5 terminating resistors to a "bus". It had been installed by a proper star, the college's lecturer that taught networks on the HNC course.
Every 386/486 I touched had the ISA frontside bus running at clock/2 after I had my hands on it. People noticed, there were staff and students asking why are these computers so much faster?
Had a batch of 486DX33 come in to CAD dept as hand downs. They were "professionally" set-up by an authorised AutoCAD educational reseller. I knew they were borked, I hadn't been allowed to fix them. They had 4Mb on the motherboard and 16Mb on a ruddy 8Mhz expansion card, soon sorted that and the BIOS clock. Then they ran faster than the Pentium 66s that had replaced them in the business unit.
Had 5 dual screen computers with VGA and Mono text cards for CAM. Had to "exchange" some of the mono cards to get it run the max ISA clock speed.
The biggest pisser was when connecting CAD dept to college network. The IBM Model 70 needed a £125 super duper MCA bus network card. All the other generic 386/486 ISA PC's got £25 NE2000 clones. The IBM dropped packets, all the cheap ones were solid 100%, maybe cos the ISA bus was running at 12Mhz or 16Mhz and not 10 Mhz that MCA ran at. The IBM had been bought when £1500 suddenly turned up unspent in budget at end of the year. I could have put 2 seats with generic 386/33 in for that money instead of 1 IBM 386/20. People really should have been sacked for buying IBM.