A Dolphin D or DX host adapter. This is the Dolphin Express hardware installed in the cluster nodes.

A computer which is part of the Dolphin Express interconnect, which means it has an adapter installed. All nodes together constitute the cluster.

The CPU architecture relevant in this guide is characterized by the addressing width of the CPU (32 or 64 bit) and the instruction set (x86, Sparc, etc.). If these two characteristics are identical, the CPU architecture is identical for the scope of this guide.

A The cable between two adapters or between an adapter and a switch.

The single computer that is running software that monitors and controls the nodes in the cluster. For increased fault tolerance, the frontend should not be part of the Dolphin Express interconnect it controls, although this is possible. Instead, the frontend should communicate with the nodes out-of-band, which means via Ethernet.

The installation script is typically executed on the frontend, but can also be executed on another machine that is neither a node nor the frontend, but has network (ssh) access to all nodes and the frontend. This machine is the installation machine.

The interconnect drivers are kernel modules and thus need to be built for the exact kernel running on the node (otherwise, the kernel will refuse to load them). To build kernel modules on a machine, the kernel-specific include files and kernel configuration have to be installed - these are not installed by default on most distributions. You will need to have one kernel build machine available which has these files installed (contained in the kernel-devel RPM that matches the installed kernel version) and that runs the exact same kernel version as the nodes. Typically, the kernel build machine is one of the nodes itself, but you can choose to build the kernel modules on any other machine that fulfills the requirements listed above.

All nodes constitute the cluster.

The network manager is a daemon process named dis_networkmgr running on the frontend. It is part of the Dolphin software stack and manages and controls the cluster using the node managers running on all nodes. The network manager knows the interconnect status of all nodes.

The node manager is a daemon process that is running on each node and provides remote access to the interconnect driver and other node status to the network manager. It reports status and performs actions like configuring the installed adapter or changing the interconnect routing table if necessary.

A self-installing archive (SIA) is a single executable shell command file (for Linux and Solaris) that is used to compile and install the Dolphin software stack in all required variants. It largely simplifies the deployment and management of a Dolphin Express-based cluster.

Scalable Coherent Interface is one of the interconnect implementations that can be used with Dolphin Express software, like SuperSockets and SISCI. SCI is an IEEE standard; the implementation offered by Dolphin are the D33x and D35x series of adapter cards.

Next to the SCI interconnect, Dolphin offers the Dolphin Express DX interconnect hardware. This is the latest interconnect from Dolphin and offers increased performance. In contrast to SCI, it use a dedicated switch and thus scales less easily.

SISCI is the user-level API to create applications that make direct use of the low level Dolphin Express interconnect shared memory capabilities.