Dolphin Interconnect Solutions

Last updated
Dolphin Interconnect Solutions
OSE: DOLP
Founded1989;35 years ago (1989)
Headquarters Oslo, Norway
Website www.dolphinics.com

Dolphin Interconnect Solutions is a privately held manufacturer of high-speed data communication systems headquartered in Oslo, Norway [1] [2] and Woodsville, New Hampshire, USA.

Contents

The technology of Dolphin was based on development work at Norsk Data during the late 1980s. Dolphin Interconnect Solutions was founded in 1992 as a spin-off from Dolphin Server Technology which was, in turn, a spin-off from Norsk Data in 1989. [3] [4] Dolphin Interconnect Solutions develops technology for low latency and high-speed communication between servers and/or embedded computer systems.

History

Dolphin Server Technology emerged from Norsk Data, "a formerly flourishing Norwegian minicomputer maker", with one of its aims to build a business developing systems based on the Motorola 88000 architecture, these being adopted by Norsk Data as the new company's initial customer, with the intention of gradually reducing Norsk Data's stake to less than 50 percent and thus gradually increasing the new company's independence. [5] Dolphin was established as a consequence of the restructuring of Norsk Data in 1988, the separation of product development from other aspects of the parent company's business, and the transfer of 125 employees from Norsk Data's development divisions. Another initial activity was to develop a Unix system for Norsk Data's existing ND-5000 range. [6] :6

Following an initial product announcement in late 1989, [7] by April 1990, Dolphin Server Technology had started shipping products in its Triton 88 series, based on the Motorola 88000 processor family, with these systems supporting up to four processors. Compliant with the 88open Consortium's standards, the Triton 88 series ran a Unix product developed by UniSoft, providing binary compatibility with contemporary 88000-based systems. Dolphin offered these products through value-added resellers in European, North American, and South American markets, also cultivating business with original equipment manufacturers, resulting in the Triton 88 models appearing "under several different brand names" worldwide. [8]

Having announced plans for an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) version of the Motorola 88000, projected to run at 125 MHz, executing up to eight instructions in parallel, and delivering a peak performance of 1000 MIPS, [9] Dolphin Server Technology participated in the development and standardization of Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) technology, delivering the first prototype in 1992 for an implementation of the base SCI standard as a gate array fabricated by Vitesse Semiconductor. A CMOS implementation was demonstrated in 1994 in association with LSI Logic. [10]

They were among the pioneers in the development and commercialization of the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) technology. SCI was one of the earliest high-speed interconnect technologies designed to enable multiprocessing and data sharing across a wide area, significantly enhancing the performance of clustered computing environments. This innovation helped set the stage for the development of modern high-performance computing networks.

The company had announced its plans for the ECL variant of the 88000, named Orion and developed in conjunction with Motorola, in December 1989. This processor, employing a technique called "instruction folding" originating from research done within Norsk Data, involved "a mutual exchange of patented technology" between the companies. It was hoped that Orion would ship in the first half of 1992. [8] Initially mentioned in Norsk Data's 1988 annual report, Orion was also the subject of a project under the auspices of the EUREKA programme in association with Siemens and NTNU, "building on four different technologies from Siemens AG, Motorola Inc., National Semiconductor Ltd. and Dolphin". [6] :36

Dolphin's ECL variant had, however, reportedly been abandoned already in early 1991 due to unspecified difficulties, with the company refocusing its Orion efforts on "Motorola's post-88110, 100MHz BiCMOS technology". The company planned to deliver an "interim Triton SCI system" early in 1992, combining elements of Orion with the Motorola 88110, awaiting SCI's ratification by the IEEE before committing to a final product. Meanwhile, Dolphin planned enhancements to its Triton88 product, including a plug-in board with up to five 88000 processors and support for Unix System V Release 4. [11] The company also introduced a low-end Triton88 system to its range in September 1991, priced just below £10,000. [12]

In 1993, Dolphin, described as a vendor of "RISC-based UNIX multiprocessor servers" specializing in solutions for the government and banking, announced a deal with NeXT to resell NeXT computer products and to license NeXT's software technology. [13] Ultimately, Dolphin "abandoned the server market entirely", [4] :472 the SCI product business itself being spun out as Dolphin Interconnect Solutions prior to TBK Telematikk's acquisition of Dolphin Server Technology in 1994. The acquired business was reoriented, becoming "a subsidiary focusing on support" within TBK, [3] itself an organisation wholly owned by the Norwegian telecommunications monopoly that would later become Telenor. [14]

Products

Dolphin started out continuing the development of a line of SCI products [15] from Norsk Data, by implementing customer-specific technology, as well as providing Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) and later PCIe boards for commodity and high-performance computing (HPC) systems. Sun Microsystems agreed to re-sell Dolphin's SCI interfaces for the SBus in 1996. [16] Dolphin SCI products are available under the Dolphin Express SCI label.

The StarFabric product line was added through the acquisition of StarGen Inc. in early 2007. [17] StarGen shareholders received about 22% of the combined company. StarGen, which became the US subsidiary of Dolphin, had been based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and led by Tim Miller. [18] StarFabric provides a PCI-based interconnect running over standard Ethernet Category 5 cables. Similarly, the Dolphin Express DX product line introduced in 2006 was also acquired from StarGen. DX was based on the Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) standard and implements a PCI Express Gen1 switched-topology technology supporting both host to host communication and host to IO expansion over an individual cable connection. [19] A company called Numascale was spun out of Dolphin in 2008, referring to the concept of non-uniform memory access (NUMA). [20]

The Dolphin Express IX product line introduced in 2010 is based on PCIe Gen2 and Gen3 integrated circuits ("chips") from Integrated Device Technology. The Dolphin Express PX product line, introduced in 2016, is based on PCI Express Gen3 chipsets from Broadcom. IX and PX implements a PCIe-native switched-topology technology.

The SISCI application programming interface (API) was developed for the shared memory SCI hardware. With the introduction of the PX, IX, and DX-line of products, the API was expanded to support features like reflective memory, [21] multicast and PCIe peer-to-peer communication.

SuperSockets is a software platform for Dolphin Express providing a low latency, high throughput implementation of the Berkeley sockets and Winsock APIs. [22] It was introduced in 2007. [23]

SmartIO has been used to share GPUs, NVMe drives, and other devices in a PCIe network. [24] [25] [26] [27]

Related Research Articles

The 88000 is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola during the 1980s. The MC88100 arrived on the market in 1988, some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the late start and extensive delays releasing the second-generation MC88110, the m88k achieved very limited success outside of the MVME platform and embedded controller environments. When Motorola joined the AIM alliance in 1991 to develop the PowerPC, further development of the 88000 ended.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Expansion card</span> Circuit board for connecting to a computer system to add functionality

In computing, an expansion card is a printed circuit board that can be inserted into an electrical connector, or expansion slot on a computer's motherboard to add functionality to a computer system. Sometimes the design of the computer's case and motherboard involves placing most of these slots onto a separate, removable card. Typically such cards are referred to as a riser card in part because they project upward from the board and allow expansion cards to be placed above and parallel to the motherboard.

HyperTransport (HT), formerly known as Lightning Data Transport, is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001. The HyperTransport Consortium is in charge of promoting and developing HyperTransport technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PCI Express</span> Computer expansion bus standard

PCI Express, officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common motherboard interface for personal computers' graphics cards, capture cards, sound cards, hard disk drive host adapters, SSDs, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet hardware connections. PCIe has numerous improvements over the older standards, including higher maximum system bus throughput, lower I/O pin count and smaller physical footprint, better performance scaling for bus devices, a more detailed error detection and reporting mechanism, and native hot-swap functionality. More recent revisions of the PCIe standard provide hardware support for I/O virtualization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">VMEbus</span> Computer bus standard physically based on Eurocard sizes

VMEbus is a computer bus standard physically based on Eurocard sizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scalable Coherent Interface</span> High-speed interconnect standard for shared memory multiprocessing and message passing

The Scalable Coherent Interface or Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI), is a high-speed interconnect standard for shared memory multiprocessing and message passing. The goal was to scale well, provide system-wide memory coherence and a simple interface; i.e. a standard to replace existing buses in multiprocessor systems with one with no inherent scalability and performance limitations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Norsk Data</span> Defunct Norwegian computer manufacturer

Norsk Data was a minicomputer manufacturer located in Oslo, Norway. Existing from 1967 to 1998, it had its most active period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. At the company's peak in 1987, it was the second largest company in Norway and employed over 4,500 people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quadrics (company)</span>

Quadrics was a supercomputer company formed in 1996 as a joint venture between Alenia Spazio and the technical team from Meiko Scientific. They produced hardware and software for clustering commodity computer systems into massively parallel systems. Their highpoint was in June 2003 when six out of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world were based on Quadrics' interconnect. They officially closed on June 29, 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chipset</span> Electronic component to manage data flow of a CPU

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Aviion was a series of computers from Data General that were the company's main product from the late 1980s until the company's server products were discontinued in 2001. Earlier Aviion models used the Motorola 88000 CPU, but later models moved to an all-Intel solution when Motorola stopped work on the 88000 in the early 1990s. Some versions of these later Intel-based machines ran Windows NT, while higher-end machines ran the company's flavor of Unix, DG/UX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GeForce 6 series</span> Series of GPUs by Nvidia

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">PCI-X</span> Computer bus and expansion card standard

PCI-X, short for Peripheral Component Interconnect eXtended, is a computer bus and expansion card standard that enhances the 32-bit PCI local bus for higher bandwidth demanded mostly by servers and workstations. It uses a modified protocol to support higher clock speeds, but is otherwise similar in electrical implementation. PCI-X 2.0 added speeds up to 533 MHz, with a reduction in electrical signal levels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altix</span> Supercomputer family

Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics, based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RapidIO</span> High-speed interconnect technology

The RapidIO architecture is a high-performance packet-switched electrical connection technology. It supports messaging, read/write and cache coherency semantics. Based on industry-standard electrical specifications such as those for Ethernet, RapidIO can be used as a chip-to-chip, board-to-board, and chassis-to-chassis interconnect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Motorola 88110</span> Microprocessor developed by Motorola

The MC88110 was a microprocessor developed by Motorola that implemented the 88000 instruction set architecture (ISA). The MC88110 was a second-generation implementation of the 88000 ISA, succeeding the MC88100. It was designed for use in personal computers and workstations.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Integrated Device Technology</span> U.S. semiconductor manufacturer

Integrated Device Technology, Inc. (IDT), was an American semiconductor company headquartered in San Jose, California. The company designed, manufactured, and marketed low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor products for the advanced communications, computing, and consumer industries. The company marketed its products primarily to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Founded in 1980, the company began as a provider of complementary metal-oxide semiconductors (CMOS) for the communications business segment and computing business segments. The company focused on three major areas: communications infrastructure, high-performance computing, and advanced power management. Between 2018 and 2019, IDT was acquired by Renesas Electronics.

Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI), is a high-speed processor expansion bus standard for use in large data center computers, initially designed to be layered on top of PCI Express, for directly connecting central processing units (CPUs) to external accelerators like graphics processing units (GPUs), ASICs, FPGAs or fast storage. It offers low latency, high speed, direct memory access connectivity between devices of different instruction set architectures.

M-PHY is a high speed data communications physical layer protocol standard developed by the MIPI Alliance, PHY Working group, and targeted at the needs of mobile multimedia devices. The specification's details are proprietary to MIPI member organizations, but a substantial body of knowledge can be assembled from open sources. A number of industry standard settings bodies have incorporated M-PHY into their specifications including Mobile PCI Express, Universal Flash Storage, and as the physical layer for SuperSpeed InterChip USB.

Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open standard for high-speed, high capacity central processing unit (CPU)-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections, designed for high performance data center computers. CXL is built on the serial PCI Express (PCIe) physical and electrical interface and includes PCIe-based block input/output protocol (CXL.io) and new cache-coherent protocols for accessing system memory (CXL.cache) and device memory (CXL.mem). The serial communication and pooling capabilities allows CXL memory to overcome performance and socket packaging limitations of common DIMM memory when implementing high storage capacities.

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