Interconnect resource manager

Dolphin provides an Interconnect Resource Manager (IRM) to make it seamless to integrate clusters using Dolphins adapter cards and switches. The IRM provides a kernel interface (GENIF) to ease the development of SCI clustering solutions for UNIX and Windows. Typical GENIF clients are networking drivers such as UNIX DLPI (Data Link Provider Interface) and Windows NDIS (Network Device Interface Specification) and the Dolphin SISCI driver.

The IRM is particularly suited for other drivers that need to achieve high availability in mission critical applications. Features such as reliable data delivery, hardware fault detection and isolation, redundancy and serviceability are supported through the rich set of features being offered through the GENIF interface without loss of performance or latency.

The IRM removes the complexity of writing low level hardware dependent device drivers and it allows multiple higher level drivers to utilize SCI and to coexist in the same computer even running on the same SCI adapter card. This enables traditional networking drivers using e.g. TCP/IP to be used in parallel with smart low latency SCI software.


Features and Benefits

  • Supports and manages SCI rings, Switches and 2D/3D Torus topologies
  • Enables multiple kernel modules to use SCI without the need to know about each other.
  • Enables transparent access to remote memory for ultra-low latency access
  • Provides memory-to-memory DMA transfers for low overhead data copying
  • Enables interrupts to be passed to remote nodes for signaling
  • Detects and report all errors for reliable operation
  • Supports redundant adapters for increased fault tolerance
  • Transparent heartbeat-alive checks to detect nodes joining or leaving a cluster
  • Guaranteed data delivery or client notification by user-defined callback ensures reliable operation
  • Supports user defined callbacks on Cluster events
  • Supports hot-pluggable links for high availability operation
  • Rolling upgrades to next version
  • Highly portable.

The IRM is currently available for Linux 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6 - x86/x86_64, IA64, Solaris 2.5.1, 2,6, 7, 8, 9 - SPARC, Solaris 2.6, 7 - x86, VxWorks 5.4 - PPC and x86, Windows NT/XP/2000/2003 - x86, Lynx 3.0.1 - x86 and PPC. The IRM is portable by design and the full source for all operating systems is available for immediate download as LGPL/GPL code. Please consult Dolphin for porting assistance.