Performance of Symmetry Multiprocessor System

This paper presents the performance characteristics of three members of the Sequent Symmetry series of parallel processors. The performance of two homogeneous parallel applications, Butterfly Network Simulator and Parallel Linpack is described here. The system performance was also observed on a large multi-user software development environment. Performance is measured in terms of bus utilization, cache miss-rate, and application speed. The Symmetry system gives us a unique opportunity to measure system performance with two different cache coherence protocols with the same hardware.