Multiple Bus Architectures

A recent study noted that for shared memory multiprocessors the single system bus typically used to connect the processor to the memory is by far the most limiting resource, and system performance can be increased considerably by increasing the capacity of the bus. One way of increasing the bus capacity, and also the system's reliability and fault tolerance, is to increase the number of buses. In this article the authors discuss using multiple buses to provide highbandwidth connections between the processors and the shared memory, thereby allowing the construction of larger and more powerful systems than currently possible.