Message-Passing on PCI-SCI Network Interfaces
Wolfgang Rehm, Simeon Simeonov, Mario Trams, D. Balkanski · 2000
this paper we present some ideas for new architecture of such communication hardware, which will combine the benefits of SCI distributed shared memory with high effectiveness and low latencies of protected user level DMA of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA). The final goal of our research is to develop PCI-SCI bridge with completely new design which will be very suitable for building inexpensive clusters optimized for message passing applications. I. Motivation and Introduction Scaleable Coherent Interface (SCI)[1] is modern communication technology with very high bandwidth, extremely low latency, scalable architecture and support of distributed multiprocessing that allows building of large systems out of many inexpensive units. SCI acts like a modern equivalent of processor/memory/IO bus and Local Area network, which uses a single address space to specify data, as well as its source and destination when being transported and in this way implements distributed