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To: cksla who wrote (5729)	10/10/1998 9:43:00 AM
From: cksla	Respond to of 8581

GSN Workshop, 13 October 1998 Gigabyte System Network Overview Dr. Greg Chesson, Chief Scientist, R&D Division, Silicon Graphics Inc abstract: GSN, or Gigabyte System Network, is the product name selected by the Hippi Network Forum for Hippi-6400 compliant systems. The Hippi-6400 project within the ANSI X3T11 organization began in January 1996 although proof-of-concept hardware was demonstrated in 1995. The technology of GSN is embodied in several ANSI documents, a MAC chip that implements the PHY standard, switching technology, and a new transfer protocol called ST (Scheduled Transfer Protocol). The PHY-level chip, named SuMAC, has been operational since December 1997. Multi-vendor hardware incorporating SuMAC chips is now beginning to emerge in early beta form. Some of these hardware implementations will be described. The SuMAC chip is available from a vlsi distributor under license from Silicon Graphics. A GSN link, simply described, employs a cellular unit of transmission called a micropacket which consists of 32 data bytes and 8 control bytes with a transmission data rate of 1000 MBytes/sec. The control bytes provide for 2 16-bit crc's on every micropacket and check both link integrity and end-to-end data integrity. The control bytes also provide for flow control and retransmission on a micropacket basis. The link and switch fabric provide 4 virtual channels rather than a larger number of virtual circuits. This allows all data buffers to reside within the system asics. The SuMAC chip incorporates sufficient buffering for a 1 km link. The presentation will include detailed information on the design of the links and chips as well as background information on some of the history and motivation represented by the design. A sequence of micropackets makes up a message, or frame, in GSN. The first micropacket contains a header structure which is identical to Ethernet plus a 32-bit message length field. One could think of GSN as a kind of gigabyte Ethernet were it not for the cellular structure and other features. However, it is likely that GSN will be useful as a backbone technology for gigabit Ethernet and other networks because of the ease of translation between similar frame formats. In addition to the Ethernet-like header, the ANSI standard for ST specifies an optional 40-byte ST header. This header is used to capture the semantics of bulk transfer, remote memory access, and the notion of end-to-end data movement transactions. Encapsulations for ST have been defined for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Hippi, Hippi-6400, and ATM. Mappings onto ST of upper layer protocols and APIs are actively being pursued for MPI, SCSI, VIA, and byte streams. The ST specification may be unique in that state tables are included in the standard for the entire protocol - not just connection management. The presentation will present ST concepts in some detail as well as the status of works in progress. Greg Chesson ========== any comments from our technical gurus?? this sounds good in that it gives a bigger pipeline for the network backbone but yet is easily adaptible to all the prior formats, ethernet, fibre channel, atm, etc. bob