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The Arctic Switch Fabric |
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The compute nodes in the Hyades cluster are
connected by the Arctic "switch fabric", a high-speed, very reliable and
flexible packet-switched network developed at MIT.
In Hyades the Arctic fabric is configured to form a fat-tree interconnect.
This configuration supports concurrent nearest neighbor transfers by each node
with near perfect scalability whilst global operations scale as log2(N). The
majority of the
network performance can be exploited by user applications because the Arctic
network is designed to be
almostly perfectly reliable, so that complex (and costly) hand-shaking and error handling
overheads are avoided.
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Start-X Network Interface Card |
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Compute nodes attach to the
Arctic network through Start-X Network Interface Cards.
Start-X is a PCI card that provides a user-level hardware
interface to the network. The network card
supports programmed I/O, cacheable queues that map to
host memory and remote direct memory access (RDMA).
This provides the foundation for strong support
of fine-grain parallel codes, with reasonably high amounts
of communication relative to computation, as well as support for
coarse grain parallel programs in which extended periods are
of computation are performed between communication and synchronisation
points.
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StarT-X: A One-Man-Year Exercise in Network Interface Engineering,
James C. Hoe, Proceedings of Hot Interconnects VI, Stanford, California, August 1998. (10 pages)
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Arctic Switch Fabric, George A. Boughton, Proceedings of the 1997 Parallel Computing, Routing, and Communication Workshop, Atlanta, GA, June 1997
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Functional Specification of a High-Performance Network Interface Unit on a Peripheral Bus, James C. Hoe, September 1996, (34 pages).
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Arctic Routing Chip,
George A. Boughton, Proceedings of the 1994 University of Washington Parallel Computer Routing and Communication Workshop, May, 1994.
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The Monsoon Interconnection Network, C. F. Joerg and G. A. Boughton, January 1991, In Proceedings of the 1991 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design, Cambridge, MA, October 1991, (5 pages).
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Design and Implementation of a Packet Switched Routing Chip - S.M. Thesis,
C. F. Joerg , May 1990, (120 pages).
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Network Architecture - schematic showing the design of the Arctic network. |
