Dolphin SCI Adapter Cards

Abstract

The Dolphin Interconnect Solutions SCI adapter cards have been available since 1993 and have been in use in many applications at many different sites. The product line started with a quite simple SBus card with limited performance and feature set and continued with more sophisticated cards for the PCI bus. All cards are based on the Dolphin  Link Controllers LC-1 and LC-2 (LC) [1] which are also used in many other applications like the Dolphin SCI switches and other SCI hardware described in this book.

The SBus cards were developed in cooperation with Sun Microsystems to be used in Sun’s clustering solutions. The development of the PCI-SCI bridge was initiated by Dolphin to enable connecting SCI to a more widely used bus; a cooperation with Siemens Nixdorf was established to achieve this after the selection of SCI as the I/O interconnect for Siemens midrange servers. The cards are available for 32-bit PCI at 33 MHz (PCI32) and 64-bit PCI at 33 MHz (PCI64). The PCI64 is a superset of PCI32. The description of PCI32 also applies to PCI64 except when explicitly stated otherwise. A 66-MHz, 64-bit version of the PCI card will be available in the near future.

This chapter describes how the SCI adapters work and what kind of applications the cards can be used in. Issues about using shared memory over the I/O bus are also discussed. An overview of the different software components and interfaces of Dolphin’s portable SCI driver will also be given in this chapter.