Architecture
The Challenge is a shared-memory multiprocessor computer. The system is based on nodes, which are implemented as boards that plug into a midplane containing Ebus slots and the POWERpath-2 "Ebus" bus, a system bus that the nodes use to communicate with other nodes. The POWERpath-2 bus consists of a 256-bit path for data and a 40-bit path for addressing clocked at 47.6 MHz (21-nanosecond cycle), providing 1.2 GB/s of sustained bandwidth.
The midplane in DM and L models contains five Ebus slots that can support a combination of three CPU, one memory or two POWERchannel-2 interface boards. The midplane also contains five VME expansion slots.
The midplane in XL models contains fifteen Ebus slots that can support a combination of nine CPU, eight memory or five POWERchannel-2 interface boards. The midplane also contains six VME expansion slots and three power board slots.
Read more about this topic: SGI Challenge
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“In short, the building becomes a theatrical demonstration of its functional ideal. In this romanticism, High-Tech architecture is, of course, no different in spirit—if totally different in form—from all the romantic architecture of the past.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)
“And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)