June SCI meetings in Mpls with FC, August SCI Workshop

[Dave Gustavson]

The Scalable Coherent Interface's various accessories and enhancements
working groups will be meeting in the Hotel Sofitel alongside the
Fibre Channel and related groups, June 22-24, 1994.

Customers are becoming increasingly interested in using FibreChannel
and SCI together, and so we are studying the issues involved in
building bridges between the two protocols. A first pass has revealed
no particular difficulty, and so we expect this work will continue.

FibreChannel and SCI are optimized for solving different parts of
the data communication problem:
SCI is optimized for minimum latency when randomly transferring short
bursts of data, such as one finds in a multiprocessor distributed-
shared-memory system.
FibreChannel is optimized for efficient transmission of long blocks
of data from one point to another, with a credit-based system of
flow control that is good for keeping throughput high as transmission
distance increases, but is less well suited to random traffic patterns
such as one expects in a multiprocessor distributed-shared-memory system.
SCI supports local caching of remote data to reduce the average cost
of remote data access, and provides a cache coherence mechanism to
keep all the cached copies consistent even when the data is being
changed. FibreChannel does not address caching, but deals instead
with buffer management.

Thus it seems that each group may learn some useful things from the
other, and that many practical systems will include both FibreChannel
and SCI (and likely also ATM). Meeting together in Minneapolis will
give us a chance to talk together, and to learn one anothers' languages,
good preparation for future coexistence and cooperation.

The SCI tutorials on June 22, especially in the morning, would be
particularly useful for anyone who is curious about SCI. They are
open to anyone who wishes to attend, at no charge. Our
other meetings are also open to everyone, but may be harder to
understand unless you have some background in SCI already.

I apologize that these sessions overlap some other meetings that
may be important for you to attend, but a variety of constraints
limited our choices. If you want to come, but are unable due to
these conflicts, perhaps the August 17 tutorial day at Santa Clara
University will be useful to you.

Hope to see you in Minneapolis!
Dave Gustavson, SCI chairman



August 17-18, following Hot Interconnects and Hot Chips at
Stanford, come to Santa Clara University just down the El Camino Real
a few miles, to learn more about a _Really_COOL_Interconnect!

SCIzzL will have an SCI Tutorial Day and an SCI Workshop at Santa
Clara University. There will be a $150/day fee, for those who can
afford it, and a $25 discount for preregistration by July 25. For
details, contact Qiang Li (pronounced "Chang Lee") at
qli at sunrise.scu.edu.

CALL FOR PAPERS: We already have some good papers, but we have room
for more. Please send us an abstract. We're looking for SCI-related
papers, about designs, implementation experiences, plans, ideas,
simulations, performance measurements.

They will be reviewed by the program committee, and (if accepted)
published in a Proceedings, and as many as possible
will be presented orally. There will be opportunities to gain from
one another's experiences with early SCI implementations.


The May SCI newsletter ("SCIzzL ink") is now available in PostScript
form on SCI's anonymous ftp server:
hplsci.hpl.hp.com (192.6.19.31) (NOTE: this is a new IP address) in
/pub/sci/SCInewsletters/SCIzzLmay94.ps


***Tentative agenda for June 22-24, 1994:

      Weds. 22Jun94     Thurs. 23Jun94   Fri. 24Jun94

0900  Intros, Tutorial  KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
0930  Intros, Tutorial  KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1000  Intros, Tutorial  KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1030   Break             Break            Break
1045  Shared Data Fmts  KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1115  LVDS              KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1145  LVDS              KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1215   Lunch             Lunch            Lunch
1330  RamLink Basics    KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1400  RamLink I/O       KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1430  RamLink           KiloProcess Ext  SCI/RealTime
1500   Break             Break            Break
1515  SCI Pinouts       SCI/VME Bridge   S2I P1285
1545  SCI Cables        SCI switches      and DMA
1615  SCI Connectors    SCI switches     S2I P1285
1645  SCI Fiber         SCI switches      and DMA
1715  SCI Extensions    SCI switches     S2I P1285



***Other future meetings:

September 20-23, SCI working group meetings, tutorials, and an SCI
Workshop, in Oslo, Norway.

For more information, contact Ernst Kristiansen, Center for
Industrial Research, P.O. Box 124 Blindern, N-0314 Oslo, Norway,
tel 011-47-22-067838, fax 011-47-22-067350, email:
Ernst.Kristiansen at si.no
or Prof. Stein Gjessing, University of Oslo, P.O.B. 1080 Blindern,
N-0316 Oslo 3, Norway, tel 011-47-22852444, fax 011-47-22852401,
email: gjessing at ifi.uio.no

November 14-16 SCI working group meetings at Santa Clara
University.


--David B. Gustavson              phone 415/961-0305 fax 415/961-3530
SCI (ANSI/IEEE Std 1596 Scalable Coherent Interface) chairman
Executive Director, SCIzzL:SCI Users,Devel&Mfgrs Assoc.,Santa Clara U
1946 Fallen Leaf Lane, Los Altos, CA 94024-7206   dbg at sunrise.scu.edu