10. What's Special about PCI Express and SuperSockets?

PCI Express and SuperSockets offer a number of unique and outstanding features for high-performance communication via the socket interface:

Lowest Latency

SuperSockets offer the lowest effective latency .

Highest Message Rate

The effective application performance is not only determined by the low latency, but also by the rate at which message can be processed. This is different from raw latency, and SuperSockets has an excellent message rate as well.

High Scalability

The low protocol overhead of SuperSockets for both, CPU and host adapter, ensures low CPU utilization and a good scalability with the number of cores in each machine.

Interruptless Mode

For real-time environments, SuperSockets can be operated in a mode which does not trigger interrupts during communication. This allows for lowest overhead and high timing predictability.

SuperSockets Semantics 

SuperSockets offer a large set of the Winsock2 socket semantics. Please consult the release note for more information.