Chapter 12: Alpha and Alpha Cluster

Chapter 12: Alpha and Alpha Cluster

Performance Implications

The Alpha systems are a series of very high-performance processors. When they are coupled with disks and tapes that have reasonable performance characteristics, they significantly extend the product line of DEC's hardware offerings. The Alpha systems are based on the 21064 chip, which is a high performance reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture coupled with a 64-bit wide data path. Newer machines are using the 21064A/21164 chip sets. These very fast processors have clock rates from 150 MHz to substantially exceeding 300 MHz as production-released chips. I anticipate seeing new chips of over 350 MHz or more in the foreseeable future.

What all of this raw system power means to you, the end user, is that now you can be less concerned with overall efficient programming style of your code and become much more involved in what I call the "application architecture." You can expect many applications to run much faster just by being ported to the Alpha systems because of the tremendous speed of the new chips. By doing some minimal work with utilities, such as properly linking the application, you can significantly increase performance in applications that tend to be compute bound, e.g., perform very little I/O and mostly execute code. If you do not want to recompile and relink your code, you can consider "vesting" it to the Alpha environment. A "vest" means that the executable image is translated to the Alpha environment without a recompilation. However a "vest"...

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