The Starfire SMP interconnect

摘要

The Starfire interconnect extends the envelope of Unix symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems in several dimensions. Interconnect: an active centerplane with four address routers and a 16x16 data crossbar provides 64 UltraSPARC processors with uniform memory access at a bandwidth of 10,667 MBps. Flexibility: Starfire can be dynamically reconfigured into multiple hardware-protected operating system domains. Robustness: Failing boards can be hot swapped without interrupting system operation. Performance: Starfire has sustained over 23 GFLOPS on out-of-core equation solving. It has set TPC-D decision-support records at both the 300 GB and 1 TB sizes.