I don't remember very precisely, but a friend who apparently saw them physically reported that they were of the "pizza box" form factor used for many Sun workstations. A fourth, identical unit was used as a fileserver for the other three.Four-way 100MHz boxes? I don't recall Sun making something like that. What kinds of machines were they exactly?Looks like I was wrong about it being low-end. :-) This machine replaced a cluster of three four-way 100MHz boxes, which *were* repurposed workstations.
Naturally. I was comparing the 250K score on the 480MHz UltraSPARC with the 270K on the 400MHz G3, which works out about 20% difference.Keep in mind that your E450 is an SMP box, but the code you're running almost certainly is not parallelized. So, you're only going to be using one CPU.FWIW, it appears that the UltraSPARC II is slightly less efficient (by maybe 20%) per-clock than the G3, but that's not a bad deal overall - the G3 is known to be exceptionally good in that area.
It would be interesting to compare these hashcash benchmarks against the SPEC CPU benchmarks at <http://www.spec.org/cpu2000/>, as well as the predecessors, so that we can try to get some sort of idea how various classes of machines will perform.Yes, that might be interesting. Also worth checking are the distributed.net statistics, some of which are collected on a per-architecture basis. The distributed.net stats are interesting mainly because they use a cryptographic algorithm (RC5), which is presumably not overly dissimilar in characteristics to hashcash (SHA1).
If you can point me at the code, I can run the same test on a variety of hardware I have access to, which may provide some useful additional data points.http://hashcash.org/