The Alpha 21 364 Network Architecture

The Alpha 21364 processor provides a high-performance, highly scalable, and highly reliable network urchitecture. The router runs at I.2GHz and routes packets at a peak bandwidth of 22.4 GB/s. The network architecture scales up to a 128-processor configuration, which can support up to four terabytes of distributed Rambus memory and hundreds of terabytes of disk storage. The distributed Rambus memory is kept coherent viu a scalable, directory-based, cache coherence scheme. The network also provides a variety of reliability features, such as per-flit ECC. These features make the 21364 network architecture well-suited to support communication-intensive server applications.