The Alpha 21364 network architecture

The Alpha 21364 processor provides a high-performance, highly scalable, and highly reliable network architecture. The router runs at 1.2 GHz 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 via 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