Design Choices and First Results of Our VIA-Capable PCI-SCI Bridge

Both the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) [7] and the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) [8] aim at providing effective cluster communication systems. In previous publications we showed that SCI and VIA can be efficiently combined to form a new communication architecture (e.g. [1, 2]). In this paper we show that despite of having adopted an flexible relatively slow FPGA–based design an appropriate architectural solution may lead to a PCI–SCI hardware of which the final performance can keep race along with commercial pendants. We also describe concrete design choices we made for our hardware and present first performance measurements that demonstrate the strength of it.