SCI (Scalable Coherent Interface)

Synonyms

International standard ISO/IEC 13961:2000(E) and IEEE Std 1596, 1998 edition

Definition

Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) is the specification (standardized by ISO/IEC and the IEEE) of a high-speed, flexible, scalable, point-to-point-based interconnect technology that was implemented in various ways to couple multiple processing nodes. SCI supports both the message-passing and shared-memory communication models, the latter in either the cache-coherent or non-coherent variants. SCI can be deployed as a system area network for compute clusters, as a memory interconnect for large-scale, cache-coherent, distributed-shared-memory multiprocessors, or as an I/O subsystem interconnect.

Discussion

Introduction

SCI originated in an effort of bus experts in the late 1980s to define a very high performance computer bus (“Superbus”) that would support a significant degree of multiprocessing, i.e., number of processors. It was soon realized that backplane bus technology would not be able to...