SCI Book - Preface

Cheshire Henbury

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Scalable Coherent Interface:

Technology and Applications

Edited by Hermann Hellwagner & Alexander Reinefeld

1998, ISBN 1-901864-02-2

Preface

The Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI, IEEE standard 1596-1992) is currently emerging as a new and widely discussed way of interconnecting multiple processing nodes. Its flexibility stems mainly from its communication protocols: in contrast to many other interconnects, SCI is not restricted to either message based or shared memory communication models. Instead, SCI combines both, taking advantage of similar properties that have been investigated in such hybrid machines as Stanford's FLASH or MIT's Alewife architecture. Since SCI provides a distributed directory-based cache coherence protocol as well, it is up to the computer architect to choose from a broad range of execution models, including efficient message passing architectures as well as shared memory models, in either its NUMA or CC-NUMA variant.
European industry and research institutions have played a key role in the SCI standardization process. Based on SCI adapter cards, switches and fully integrated systems manufactured by European companies, the SCI community in Europe has done and is doing significant developments and state-of-the-art research on this important interconnect.

The objective of the SCI Europe '98 Conference, which was hosted by The European Commission's EMMSEC 98 (European Multimedia, Microprocessor Systems and Electronic Commerce) Conference and Exhibition, was to bring together researchers actively involved in the development and applications of SCI technology. Through presentations and open discussions, the aim was to exchange experiences, to review successes and setbacks, to identify promising research directions and application domains, to foster new collaborations, and to make SCI more widely known in Europe.
We are pleased to have been able to select 21 high-quality papers which were presented at the conference. These contributions cover a wide variety of aspects pertaining to SCI architectures and software: interconnect hardware and protocol issues, low-level SCI software, message passing programming environments, shared virtual memory exploiting SCI, tools, and parallel applications on SCI systems.

Two distinguished invited speakers presented their views on the SCI technology. David B. Gustavson (executive director of SCIzzL), the chairman of the SCI standardization working group, shared his insights into SCI's history, status, and future. B. Mitchell Loebel (CEO of MultiNode Microsystems Corporation) focused on the past, present, and future of SCI cache coherence. He also give a tutorial on the SCI cache coherence protocols. We are pleased that both experts from the USA accepted our invitation to give presentations to the SCI Europe '98 delegates.

We would like to thank all the authors as well as the Programme Committee members and reviewers for their enthusiasm, their time and expertise, which helped to make SCI Europe '98 become reality and a successful event. Special thanks go to Geir Horn (SINTEF Electronics and Cybernetics, Oslo) for taking care of the arrangements with the EMMSEC 98 conference secretariat, and to Oliver Heinz (PC², Paderborn) who did a lot of the organizational work. Finally, we thank the sponsors, SINTEF and the European Commission (through the Esprit SCI Working Group SCIWG), for their financial support of the SCI Europe '98 Conference.

Hermann Hellwagner and Alexander Reinefeld
SCI Europe '98 Program Co-Chairs

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