Are there any known problems with the message passing?
The low-level Myrinet driver cannot currently send 1 and 2 byte messages that do not start or end on a 4 byte boundary. The Myrinet hardware has a built-in 4 second timer that causes a network reset, when a message transfer takes longer than that time. While that is enough time to transfer all the physical memory of our nodes, it can cause problems in case of network contention. For example, when all the nodes in an application send large messages to a single node at the same time, the last few messages to arrive at the single node may have been in the network longer than the maximum of 4 seconds. We are working on solutions to recover more gracefully from such a reset. • Where did Cplant get its name? The Computational Plant derived its name from two of the main concepts behind its inception. First, Cplant is a plant is the sense of a power plant. Cplant provides compute cycles in much the same way that a power plant provides electricity. Also, Cplant is a living entity that will grow
