[Info-vax] Some VMS/x86 perf test data from WASD maintainer.

[Volker Halle]

Mark,

there are at least 2 variants of the 'VUPS' procedure. And some of these variants have my name in them.

Stromasys variant: I have been using this variant since about 19 years in CHARON-VAX and CHARON-AXP migration projects. This procedure was supposed to report the 'correct VUPS' values as documented for the older real VAX and Alpha systems:

VUPS numbers for 'real systems' were publicized by DEC, but most of these documents have disappeared from the WEB.

Here are some examples: http://www.vaxmacro.de/vvcc.html

I had to modify the Stromasys VUPS procedure (called SRI_VUPS.COM at that time, SRI = Software Resources International, which later became Stromasys), because it would enter an endless loop on the faster Alphas (> 1 GHz). And this modification found it's way into the other variants below.

FreeAXP variant:  http://www.migrationspecialties.com/Downloads/VUPS.txt
EmuVM variant: https://emuvm.com/download/vups-com-benchmark/

The above 2 are strongly related (as can be seen by this line: $ cpu_multiplier = 10 ! VAX = 10 - Alpha/AXP = 40). And there is no code in these procedures to check the architecture they're running on and adapt the CPU_MULTIPLIER ! So the VUPS results produced can not be directly compared between the Stromasys variant and the other two - although there should be a linear relation between them. The DCL code in the 'inner loop' is the same for all these variants. Pure integer performance on one single CPU.

The idea of this procedure was the ability to compare 'VUPS' values between hardware systems and their emulated counterparts. Simple DCL procedure, could be mailed and run on the target system. No compiling required. When OpenVMS on I64 came around, I was interested in also calculating the 'VUPS' values for those systems. I used the runtime of the PRIME_SIEVE program to 'calibrate' the CPU_MODIFIER value in the SRI_VUPS.COM variant, so it would report VUPS values, which allowed to compare the VAX, Alpha, I64 and now x86-64 CPUs under OpenVMS.

So whenever someone provides VUPS values, they need to also document, which procedure has been used to collect them - as John has done by calling your procedure WASD_VUPS.COM

We can continue the VUPS discussion here, but should discuss the KERNEL mode question in the VSI forum.
 
Volker.