The Dolphin Express software stack is designed to run on all current cluster hard- and software platforms, and also supports and adapts to platforms that are several years old to ensure long-term support. Generally, Dolphin strives to support every platform that can run any version of Windows, Linux or Solaris and offers a PCI (Express) slot.
The Dolphin Express D hardware (interconnect adapters) complies to the PCI industry standard (either PCI 2.2 64bit/66MHz or PCI-Express 1.0a) and will thus operate in any machine that offers compliant slots. Supported CPU architectures are:
x86 (32 and 64 bit)
PowerPC64
However, some combinations of CPU and chipset implementations offer sub-optimal performance which should be considered when planning a new system. A few cases are documented in which bugs in the chipset have shown up with our interconnect as it puts a lot of load onto the related components.
If you have questions about your specific hardware platform, please compare with the known issues listed in Appendix D, Platform Issues and Software Limitations contact Dolphin support.
The hardware platform for the nodes should be chosen from the Supported Platforms as described above. Next to the Dolphin Express specific requirements, you need to consult your application vendor expert / consultant on the recommended configuration for your application.
You need to make sure that each node / machine has one full height, half length PCI/PCI-X/PCI-Express slot available. A low profile version of the D adapters will be available soon; please contact Dolphin sales representative for availability.
The power consumption of Dolphin Express adapters is between 5W and 15W (Consult the separate data sheets for detail).
The Dolphin Express interconnect is fully inter-operable between all supported hardware platforms, also with different PCI or CPU architectures.
The frontend does only run a lightweight network manager service which does not impose special hardware properties.
However, the frontend should not be fully loaded to ensure fast operation of the network manager service.
The frontend requires a reliable Ethernet connection to all nodes.