AViiON 8600's cabinet is 73" tall and 30" deep. The unit's
footprint isn't much larger than a four-processor server box, but you'll need
extra room for its height. The oversized cabinet has a rigid metal rack for
mounting equipment parts. The components slide out on metal rails, and the
modular design provides plenty of space to let you easily change components.
Each major component has an independent power supply and a cooling subsystem
that plug into a built-in power strip on the inside of the cabinet.
Two rear doors provide access to the major components. The top portion of
the unit's frame holds the CPU Module Assembly, a metal drawer that houses the
motherboard and slides horizontally out the back of the unit. The CPU Module
Assembly has eight PCI expansion slots and four P6 module slots. Each P6 slot
holds a PCI-type card that contains two of the unit's CPUs. Under the CPU Module
Assembly is the memory board that contains the DIMM slots filled with 4GB of
RAM. The CPU Module Assembly is identical to the one in Axil Computer's
Northbridge NX801. (For more information about the Northbridge NX801, see Carlos
Bernal, "Northbridge NX801," April 1998.)
AViiON 8600's impressive components help Data General provide functional
8-way processing. With the CPU Module Assembly pulled out, we easily installed
four Digital Equipment DE500 Fast EtherWORKS PCI 10/100 adapters to connect to
the Lab's benchmarking network.
Raising the Crossbar
Scaling a system beyond four Pentium Pro processors presents special
challenges. For example, a P6 system bus supports only four processors. Axil
designed the Adaptive Memory Crossbar architecture to support two parallel P6
system buses. This architecture lets you build six-processor and eight-processor
systems. Data General uses Adaptive Memory Crossbar technology to give the
AViiON 8600 eight-processor capability.
Axil's Adaptive Memory Crossbar architecture uses standard Intel 450GX PCI
bridges that connect the two P6 buses and their PCI buses. The Adaptive Memory
Crossbar architecture has a high-performance Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM)-based
memory subsystem, an address reorder buffer, and balanced P6 bus bridge I/O
architecture to enable faster transfer speed than a 4-way configuration offers.
A high-performance SDRAM-based memory subsystem offers sustained memory
bandwidth of up to 1.066GB per second (GBps). The Adaptive Memory Crossbar
architecture's memory system has 16 interleaved memory banks, providing eight
times as much memory as a typical Pentium Pro system. Two application-specific
integrated circuit (IC) chips implement the Adaptive Memory Crossbar
architecture. The data chip switches between two data buses and a third bus
connected to the memory banks. The address chip controls data switching, checks
coherence, and routes transactions between the bridged P6 buses.
A typical memory controller processes read and write requests in the order
it receives them. An Adaptive Memory Crossbar controller performs read
operations first and delays write instructions, thus increasing system speed.
The typical memory controller often stalls during read requests because it is
waiting for write request data. The Adaptive Memory Crossbar design reorders
transactions and lets read transactions complete before starting the write
transactions.
The Adaptive Memory Crossbar's address reorder buffer lowers the overhead
on the memory system and P6 buses. Memory requests go through this buffer, and
the memory controller sends the requests to free memory banks. When a bank is
busy, the buffer lets the controller prioritize requests and reorder them to
optimize bandwidth use, thus increasing application performance as much as 30
percent to 40 percent.
Standard Intel 450GX PCI bridges connect the two P6 buses and four PCI
buses. Two PCI buses are for add-on cards, offering four PCI card slots per bus.
The other two PCI buses are for built-in Ultra SCSI channels. This balanced
design provides a disk-to-memory speed of 100MB per second (MBps)--enough
bandwidth to support most enterprise applications.
Preflight
AViiON 8600 came preconfigured with Windows NT Server 4.0, Enterprise
Edition (NTS/E). One of Data General's engineers helped us install and configure
the system. We reinstalled NT and the AViiON 8600's configuration software to
test the ease of use. For testing purposes, we divided the 10 hard drives into
four logical drives and configured the drives as RAID 0.
AViiON 8600's installation and setup is impressive. Even without
documentation, we easily identified the major components and power supplies (the
unit requires a 220V outlet). NTS/E installation went smoothly. To connect to
the Lab's domain, we used TCP/IP as the network protocol and assigned fixed IP
addresses to the four network adapter cards. Complete documentation for the
Mylex controller helps you set up the system quickly.
AViiON 8600 includes a five-page Technical Note for installing the hardware
abstraction layer (HAL) and various drivers, and manuals for NuView ManageX,
Data General's NT enterprise system management software. Data General needs to
include a reference guide with detailed information such as component
descriptions, diagrams, technical information, installation instructions, and
troubleshooting tips.
Prev. page
1
2
[3]
4
5
next page 
