ISCA '92 Proceedings of the 19th annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Synchronization Support in I/O Adapter Based SCI Clusters
CANPC '97 Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Communication and Architectural Support for Network-Based Parallel Computing
A Study of an SCI Switch Fabric
MASCOTS '97 Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems
Priority Based Messaging for Software Distributed Shared Memory
IPDPS '01 Proceedings of the 15th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
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SCI is based on unidirectional point-to-point links connected in rings. Separate rings can be connected using switches to allow for larger configurations than are feasible with a single ring. The SCI standard is implemented in the LinkController (LC-1) chip from Dolphin Interconnect Solutions. Experiments are conducted on a set of Sun UltraSparc workstations connected by the new Sbus/SCI adapters based on the LC-1. The practical limit on the number of nodes on a ring depends on the host interface and the link capacity and tuning, as well as the expected interconnect load. Single ring configurations of up to 10 nodes on a ring and 4 and 8 node systems using multiple smaller rings connected through a 4-way switch are analyzed with respect to latency and network throughput. Results demonstrate a peak aggregate ring bandwidth of 187 Mbytes/s in a 10 node ring configuration, and a peak bandwidth of 153 Mbytes/s for the 4-way switched 8 node system. Results also show that the interconnect is sensitive to certain traffic patterns, and that different topologies have different weak spots in this sense.