The SGI Origin: A ccNUMA Highly Scalable Server

The SGI Origin 2000 is a cache-coherent non-uniform memory access (ccNUMA) multiprocessor designed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics, Inc. The Origin system was designed from the ground up as a multiprocessor capable of scaling to both small and large processor counts without any bandwidth, latency, or cost cliffs.The Origin system consists of up to 512 nodes interconnected by a scalable Craylink network. Each node consists of one or two R10000 processors, up to 4 GB of coherent memory, and a connection to a portion of the XIO IO subsystem. This paper discusses the motivation for building the Origin 2000 and then describes its architecture and implementation. In addition, performance results are presented for the NAS Parallel Benchmarks V2.2 and the SPLASH2 applications. Finally, the Origin system is compared to other contemporary commercial ccNUMA systems. 1 Background Silicon Graphics has offered multiple generations of symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems based on the MIPS mic...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: James Laudon, Daniel Lenoski
• Keywords: Globally Addressable Memory, Hardware, ISCA 1997, Power Challenge, Processor Count