BladeCenter processor blades, I/O expansion adapters, and units

This paper describes the electrical architecture and design of the IBM eServer(TM) BladeCenter® processor blades, expansion blades, and input/output (I/O) expansion adapters and units. The processor blades are independent, general-purpose servers containing processors, chipsets, main memory, hard dr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIBM journal of research and development Vol. 49; no. 6; pp. 837 - 859
Main Authors Hughes, J. E., Scollard, M. L., Land, R., Parsonese, J., West, C. C., Stankevich, V. A., Purrington, C. L., Hoang, D. Q., Shippy, G. R., Loeb, M. L., Williams, M. W., Smith, B. A., Desai, D. M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Armonk International Business Machines Corporation 01.11.2005
Subjects
Access control
Array processors
Communication
Computer peripherals
Computer programming
Connectors
Design
Disk drives
Ethernet
Infrastructure
Interfaces
Memory expansion boards
Printed circuit boards
R&D
Research & development
Servers
Systems design
Universal Serial Bus
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Summary:This paper describes the electrical architecture and design of the IBM eServer(TM) BladeCenter® processor blades, expansion blades, and input/output (I/O) expansion adapters and units. The processor blades are independent, general-purpose servers containing processors, chipsets, main memory, hard drives, network interface controllers, power input control circuitry, and local systems management. The blade architecture is robust and flexible enough to enable the design of general-purpose Intel-processor-based two-way and four-way blades, IBM POWER(TM)-processor-based blades, blades based on AMD Opteron(TM) processors, and common expansion blades. In addition, the processor blades, expansion adapters, and units use a serialized-deserialized (SerDes) interface for the internal I/O fabrics, thus giving blades the flexibility to support virtually any I/O protocol that supports SerDes. Support for I/O fabrics beyond the base Gigabit Ethernet is accomplished via optional I/O expansion adapters for Fibre Channel, Myricom Myrinet®, InfiniBand®, or additional Gigabit Ethernet. Additional storage or peripheral component interface capability can be added to the processor blades via expansion blades. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-2
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:0018-8646
0018-8646
2151-8556
DOI:10.1147/rd.496.0837