[bananas] Benchmark results for a Pentium 4 PC and more on Red Hat 7.0

[Jeff Pedelty]

Bananas lovers:

I just got a Dell Precision Workstation 330 with a 1.5GHz Pentium 4
processor and 384MB of RDRAM memory.  It has a single Adaptec U29160 SCSI
controller and 3 Seagate Cheetah 18GB drives spinning at 15K RPM.  The GSA
price was ~$4800 with a 12x DVD-ROM and an nVIDIA GeForce2 (32MB) graphics
card (no monitor).    

I installed RH 7.0 out of the box, but then updated with the latest
openssh.  I striped 2 of the drives to make /usr and the other drive is /data.

As Pat suggested, I removed all packages that involved gcc-2.96, and then
installed the gcc-2.95 packages, including g77, from the Red Hat support
pages.  All of 31DEC01 AIPS built without reported error and the system
passed the Y2K verification tests.  I did not modify FDEFAULT.SH.  The
build took a bit over half an hour.

I set the AP memory size to 80MB and the speed parameter to 69 (thanks
Eric).  I put AIPS disk 1 on /usr, disk 2 on /data, disk 3 back on /usr,
and disk 4 back on /data.  All benchmark files are on disk 1, and the test
files are created on disk 2.

Y2K runs in the range 724 to 727 seconds for a peak AIPSMark(00) = 55.2.
DDT runs in 57-60 seconds for a peak AIPSMark(93) = 70.

Jeff Pedelty
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center