The Application of the AutoBahn Chip for Building a High Bandwidth, Low Latency Network of PC's or Workstations

Paper: 426
Session: F (talk)
Speaker: Leich, Holger, DESY, Zeuthen
Keywords: communication, networking, special architectures


The Application of the AutoBahn Chip for Building a High Bandwidth,
Low Latency Network of PC's or Workstations


H. Leich, U. Schwendicke, K.H. Sulanke
DESY Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
Institut fuer Hochenergiephysik, Zeuthen, Germany

A. Bartoloni, S. Cabasino, G. Garberoglio, A. Monello,
D. Rossetti, R. Tripiccione, P. Vicini
INFN Pisa and Rome, Italy

Abstract

Today's computer applications demand for a nearly unlimited bandwidth,
low latency communication. Existing solutions are either low latency,
low bandwidth (ETHERNET, FDDI) or quite expensive (ATM, FCS).

AutoBahn is a high speed, serial interconnect originally designed as an
high bandwidth serial bus for VME backplanes to maintain high speed
data exchanges (e.g. for video applications), designed by Motorola. It also
may be used to implement uni- or bidirectional serial links.

In the presentation after a short introduction to AutoBahn as a new serial data
transfer technology first test results of a VME based AutoBahn evaluation system
for point to point communications will be discussed.

In the second part the architecture of an PCI to AutoBahn interface will be
presented which enables the implementation of ring based interconnected PC's
or workstations. Herein the high data transfer bandwidth of AutoBahn is combined
with special hardware to achieve low latency communication.

It is intented that the PCI to AutoBahn interface card will run under
standard operating system, e.g. LINUX. To achieve this preliminary work for
software drivers has been carried out.