Conference mvblab::alphaserver_4100

    Re .0, you'll have to be more specific than that.  You'll have to
    specify the adapter and I/O subsystem (if storage) or physical medium
    (if network) for starters.
    
    --svb

The customer is looking to use fibre channel (100 MB/s).  He needs to have a
minimum of 60 MB/s sustained in the I/O subsystem.  Will a 4100 support this.
The turbolaser supports 65 MB/s DMA reads 4 cache blocks and 100 MB/s writes. 
Is there any stats like this for the 4100.

Roy

We've played with the beasties here:

   * To help with the disk configuration on the Rawhide, I ran some
     I/O tests to see what the controllers and disks could support. With a
     fixed I/O size of 56kb using RZ29B-VW (4.3 GB, 7200 RPM, wide) disks on
     KZPSA FWD controllers:

             KZPSA     RZ29B-VW        Reading             Writing
          Controllers   Disks     IO/sec    KB/sec    IO/sec    KB/sec

               1          1        122.90   7,037.4    109.17   6,250.8
               1          2        246.02  14,074.4    201.02  11,500.2
               1          3        299.96  17,175.9    253.87  14,528.9
               1          4        300.18  17,183.9    275.96  15,790.6
               2          2        245.63  14,054.8    216.54  12,390.0
               3          3        369.71  21,134.8    329.17  18,852.6
               4          4        492.65  28,207.4    436.36  24,975.4
               5          5        617.99  35,344.4    549.04  31,372.7
               6          6        741.69  42,409.4    660.41  37,751.6
               6          12     1,489.60  85,184.0  1,160.68  66,345.3
               6          24     1,799.96 102,995.1  1,654.24  94,337.9

                           Note: "KB" = 1000, not 1024

     Tests consisted of spiral reads or writes of 32 MBytes of data, with
     overlapped (double-buffered) I/O. No file systems were involved - the
     devices were accessed directly (logical block I/O).

   * Jean-Pierre Thibonnier in our group ran some HiPPI tests, and got
     data rates up to about 60 MB/s using TCP/IP and 80 MB/s raw.  Contact
     him at CERN::THIBONNIER if you need info on test specifics.

-cw

The AlphaServer 4100 I/O performance is limited by burst size used
by the adapter.  It easily meets your requirements if the Fibre channel
card is efficient.

/Sam

   Customer is looking to keep four DLT drives busy on an AlphaServer
   4000 series box.

   I'm guessing this configuration is going to be CI or disk limited,
   given previous numbers in this string, and the 140Mb/sec CI rates,
   given the double-CI-trip this configuration likely needs...
   
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Name: Wayne Cierkowski
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CPU Architecture: VAX
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Questions:

We are looking at installing a DLT library into our
cluster. Currently we have 2 7640's and 1 6630 in the
cluster. I know there is no SCSI adapter for the VAX
based processors so we are considering the installation
of an Alpha 4000 with 4 PCI to SCSI FWD adapters
(one adpater per tape drive) and 2 PCI to CI adapters
(we have 2 CI's in our cluster). The DLT drives would be
the DLT7000 or TZ89. My questions is, would a Alpha 4000
2 CPU (5/400) with 1 GB of main memory be able to keep
all four of the DLT7000 drives at their rated speed
(5MB/sec)? Also were can I get a performance and
benchmarks figures for such a configuration?

Many Thanks