RE: A Question about Dual CPU systems

["Dirk Terrell" <terrell@boulder.swri.edu>]

On Mon, 13 May 2002 17:13:11 -0400, Ed Troy wrote:

>In terms of pure, raw, power, I've been told by many sources that the 
>Compac (used to be DEC) Alpha is the fastest computer available. But, 
>unfortunately, there is little software available for it, unless you buy 
>very expensive compilations of common software, or compile stuff yourself.

For floating point stuff, the Alphas smoke everything in my experience.
But they are expensive and extremely finicky beasts. We have a Beowulf
cluster with 21264 Alphas and a few standalone workstations. We use the
Compaq Fortran compiler and they run circles around the x86 machines. 

Dirk