An 80Gb/s dependable communication SoC with PCI express I/F and 8 CPUs

InfiniBand is widely used as a low-latency and high-bandwidth network for high performance computing (HPC) clusters. However, power consumption and system cost become large in exchange for high performance on small-scale clusters or embedded systems. To cope with these problems, we use PCI Express (PCIe) technology as a direct communication link between computing nodes. Point-to-point bidirectional packet communication is implemented by using PCIe basic operations such as memory read/write between the host and the device. Therefore, PCIe technology can be applied to inter-node communica tion and thereby eliminate communication overhead and extra power consumption caused by the protocol conversion via the network device.