Scalable Coherent Interface
Scalable Coherent Interface
(hardware, protocol)The standard defines 1 Gbit/second serial fiber-opticlinks and 1 Gbyte/second parallel copper links. SCI has twounidirectional links that operate concurrently.
The SCI protocols support shared memory by encapsulatingbus requests and responses into SCI request and responsepackets. Packet-based handshake protocols guaranteereliable data delivery. A set of cache coherence protocolsare defined to maintain cache coherence in a shared memory system.
Message passing is supported by a compatible subset of theSCI protocols. This protocol subset does not invoke SCI cachecoherency protocols.
SCI uses 64-bit addressing and the most significant 16 bitsare used for addressing up to 64K nodes.
http://uni-paderborn.de/pc2/systems/sci/.