I/O and Gaussian 9x

[fh -AatT- oberon.qc.ag-berlin.mpg.de (Frank Haase)]

 I dont have much experience with G9x and I/O but let me comment on the two
 points raised by you.
 1) so far SCSI 2 fast-wide was not available for RS/6000 boxes - but i heard
 in some weeks it will be announced by IBM.
 2) if you do I/O to remote disks over FDDI it is extremely important to
 tune your net-performance because only crude standard settings are in the
 configuration. One can write a small test program that writes several 100 MB
 on a remote disk and can analyze the net performance with the nice monitor
 program (version 1.11 is recommended). There are several settings to be
 optimized but two important are i) the socket default buffer size
 ( see the tcp_sendspace,tcp_recvspace settings in rc.net) which is
 set to 16K and may be a good value for ethernet but FDDI has a different
 optimum and ii)  number of blocked I/O daemons (biod-proccesses) which are
 usually set to 6. The optimum values depend from your local FDDI implementation
 and should be found by a series of tests to reach the optimum net performance.
 frank