PCI express to PCI express based low latency interconnect scheme for clustering systems

• US 20070098001A1
• Filed: 10/04/2005
• Published: 05/03/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 10/04/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Mammen Thomas
• Original Assignee: Mammen Thomas
• Inventors: Thomas, Mammen
• Granted Patent: US 8,189,603 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/422
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 13/4022 using switching circuits, e.g. switching matrix, connection or expansion network G06F13/4009 takes precedence
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 13/4221 being an input/output bus, e.g. ISA bus, EISA bus, PCI bus, SCSI bus
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 13/4282 on a serial bus, e.g. I2C bus, SPI bus on daisy chain buses G06F13/4247
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 2213/0026 PCI express
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 49/40 Constructional details, e.g. power supply, mechanical construction or backplane

Abstract

PCI Express is a Bus or I/O interconnect standard for use inside the computer or embedded system enabling faster data transfers to and from peripheral devices. The standard is still evolving but has achieved a degree of stability such that other applications can be implemented using PCIE as basis. A PCIE based interconnect scheme to enable switching and inter-connection between external systems, such that the scalability can be applied to enable data transport between connected systems to form a cluster of systems is proposed. These connected systems can be any computing or embedded system. The scalability of the interconnect will allow the cluster to grow the bandwidth between the systems as they become necessary without changing to a different connection architecture.

Claims

1. An interconnected cluster comprising multiple systems and at least a switch, where each system has a PCIExpress based peripheral module (PCIE Module) at the interconnect port and the switch has sufficient number of IO ports available each with PCIExpress based peripheral modules to connect the number of systems in the cluster to the switch.

2. The interconnected cluster comprising of multiple systems and the switch in claim 1, where in, each system is connected to the switch by one or more data links connected between the PCIE module at the system interconnect port and one of the PCIE module at the IO port of the switch.

3. The interconnected cluster comprising of multiple systems and the switch in claim 1, where in, the connection between the PCIE module at the interconnect port of the system and the connected PCIE modules at the IO port of the switch can be by using multiple data links as the bandwidth requirements of the interconnect demand.

4. The interconnected cluster comprising of multiple systems and the switch in claim 1, where in, the switching between the IO ports inside the switch is controlled by the configuration software loaded into the switch.

5. The interconnected cluster comprising of multiple systems and the switch in claim 1, where in, the data and information transfer between each PCIE module at the system and the interconnected PCIE module at the IO port of the switch is by using protocol based on PCI Express.

6. An interconnected cluster system comprising of two or more smaller clusters to form a larger cluster, each small cluster having multiple systems and a switch, having suitable low latency interconnection between switches of the small clusters to allow the over all system growth.

7. The interconnected cluster system comprising of two or more smaller clusters having multiple systems and a switch each, of claim 6, where in, the interconnection between switches is scalable.

8. The interconnected cluster system comprising of two or more clusters having multiple systems and a switch each, of claim 6, where in, the cluster growth can take place without changing the architecture of the individual small clusters.