sun starfire: extending the smp envelope presented by jen miller 2/9/2004
TRANSCRIPT
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Sun Starfire: Extending the SMP Envelope
Presented by Jen Miller2/9/2004
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Starfire Overview
• 24 – 64 processors– Maximum of 4 processors per board
• Based on UMA, SMP snooping architecture
• Design focus on interconnect
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System
• 250 MHz processors with 4 MB external caches
• 16 x 16 data crossbar• Active centerplane• Point to point routing• 4 GB memory separated into 4
banks– 4 way interleaved address bus
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Interconnect
• Point to point routing: centerplane transfers addresses and data between boards- Higher latency than traditional bus- Better bandwidth, reliability,
availability• 2 cycle address transactions
- Bus determined by 2 low-order cache bits
• Data transactions- Waiting packets are buffered and
sent in 8 cycles buffer-to-buffer
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Dynamic System Domains
• Can be dynamically subdivided into multiple computers
• Each domain is a separate shared-memory SMP system– Errors confined to domain
• Great for testing and development• Starfire can replace multiple smaller systems• Domains can be created for special functions• Implemented in centerplane and system
boards via registers
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Reliability
• ECC for data transfers and address packets
• Optional hardware redundancy– Auto-reboot crash recovery
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Performance
• Bandwidth increased dramatically over prior generations
• Unix server flexibility with Dynamic System Domains
• Reliable, available, and serviceable• “Can match or exceed performance of other
parallel architectures for a lower system cost”