Ethernet ™ addressing through physical location of massively parallel systems

摘要

In a massively parallel system, a method and apparatus for uniquely assigning a MAC address(400) to a device encodes the MAC address with a physical location of the device(410). The method and apparatus include configuring device interconnections of the parallel system with physical topological information such as a rack number, a midplane number, a card number, and a chip number. A device or node with a physical location encoded MAC address may then be interrogated by location for test, diagnostic, and program loading purposes.