The Starfire SMP interconnect
Alan Charlesworth, Nicholas Aneshansley, Mark Haakmeester, Dan Drogichen, Gary Gilbert, Ricki Williams, Andrew Phelps · 1997
The Starfire Ultra Enterprise 10000 extends the envelope of UNIX SMP systems in several dimensions. Interconnect: It uses four address routers and a 16x16 data crossbar to provide 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: specially-connected workstation orchestrates service activities. Failing boards can be hot-swapped without interrupting system operation. ECC is carried on both address and data paths. Performance: Starfire has set several TPC-D decision- support benchmark records. It delivers a respectable 21 Gflops on Linpack-parallel.