What is the clock rate on the PCI bus?
The clock rate of the PCI bus is 33 MHZ. • What is the hardware latency for sending messages? What is the software latency? Check the Cplant performance page. • How large is the message header for interprocessor messages? The message header requires 64 bytes for all messages. • What binary format is used for data storage in files? The DEC Alpha uses the little endian format. • Can message passing be used to communicate with processors external to Cplant? MPI is supported as a message-passing library on the compute partition of Cplant, but off-machine connections for applications running on the compute partition are not currently supported, but are planned. • What can I do to improve message passing performance? Make sure the buffer you are sending from or receiving into is 4 or 8 byte aligned, i.e. the two least significant bits (LSB) of the buffer address are 0. Make sure your message length is a multiple of 4. Send large messages to amortize message startup overhead. • Are there any
