Adding an Expressway to Accelerate the Neighborhood Communication

The blade system is very popular in high performance computing. In a blade system, the blade is a fundamental element in which are symmetric multi-processors (SMP). About ten blades constitute a blade box, several blade boxes constitute a cabinet and some cabinets constitute a blade system at last. The blades in a blade box are neighbors because they have relatively short distance. Programmers always try to place the tightly related processes into the same blade box. However, there´s seldom any optimization made by hardware to accelerate the communication in a blade box. Thus, a single chip design called hyper-node controller is presented to provide ultra low latency and high bandwidth which resembles an expressway between neighbors. All the nodes in a blade box can act as a single hyper node by using the hyper-node controller. It is apparent that the additional controller is a useful supplement to efficiently enhance the communication in a blade box and finally enhance the entire blade system. A FPGA prototype of the hyper-node controller has been implemented and it can connect five blades simultaneously. In the preliminary performance evaluation, the latency for an 8-byte payload between two blades is less than 1us, 1.33GB/s which is nearly 94% of the peak effective bandwidth can be obtained by transferring messages with a payload of only 256 bytes.