Performance evaluation of the IBM RISC system/6000: comparison of an optimized scalar processor with two vector processors

The authors report the performance of the 6000-series computers as measured using a set of portable, standard-Fortran, computationally intensive benchmark codes that represent the scientific workload at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. On all but three of the benchmark codes, the 40-ns RISC (reduced instruction set computer) system was able to perform as well as a single Convex C-240 processor, a vector processor that also has a 40-ns clock cycle, and, on these same codes, it performed as well as the FPS-500, a vector processor with a 30-ns clock cycle.<<ETX>>