Dolphin Interconnect Solutions is a

privately held A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is ...

manufacturer of high-speed data communication systems headquartered in

Oslo Oslo ( , , or ; sma, Oslove) is the capital and most populous city of Norway. It constitutes both a county and a municipality. The municipality of Oslo had a population of in 2022, while the city's greater urban area had a population of ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and t ...

and Woodsville, New Hampshire, USA. The technology of Dolphin was based on development work at Norsk Data during the late 1980s. Dolphin Interconnect Solutions was founded in 1992 as a spin-off from Dolphin Server Technology which was, in turn, a spin-off from Norsk Data in 1989. Dolphin Interconnect Solutions develops technology for low latency and high-speed communication between servers and/or embedded computer systems.

Products

Dolphin started out continuing the development of a line of

Scalable Coherent Interface The Scalable Coherent Interface or Scalable Coherent Interconnect (SCI), is a high-speed interconnect standard for shared memory multiprocessing and message passing. The goal was to scale well, provide system-wide memory coherence and a simple i ...

(SCI) products from Norsk Data, by implementing customer-specific technology, as well as providing

Peripheral Component Interconnect Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format ...

(PCI) and later

PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common m ...

boards for commodity and

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a multi ...

(HPC) systems.

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, ...

agreed to re-sell Dolphin's SCI interfaces for the SBus in 1996. Dolphin SCI products are available under the Dolphin Express SCI label. The StarFabric product line was added through the acquisition of StarGen Inc. in early 2007. StarGen shareholders received about 22% of the combined company. StarGen, which became the US subsidiary of Dolphin, had been based in

Marlborough, Massachusetts Marlborough is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 41,793 at the 2020 census. Marlborough became a prosperous industrial town in the 19th century and made the transition to high technology industry in the ...

, and led by Tim Miller. StarFabric provides a PCI-based interconnect running over standard

Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in ...

Category 5 cable Category 5 cable (Cat 5) is a twisted pair cable for computer networks. Since 2001, the variant commonly in use is the Category 5e specification (Cat 5e). The cable standard provides performance of up to 100 MHz and i ...

s. Similarly, the Dolphin Express DX product line introduced in 2006 was also acquired from StarGen. DX was based on the Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) standard and implements a PCI Express Gen1 switched-topology technology supporting both host to host communication and host to IO expansion over an individual cable connection. A company called Numascale was spun out of Dolphin in 2008, referring to the concept of

non-uniform memory access Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) is a computer memory design used in multiprocessing, where the memory access time depends on the memory location relative to the processor. Under NUMA, a processor can access its own local memory faster than non ...

(NUMA). The Dolphin Express IX product line introduced in 2010 is based on PCIe Gen2 and Gen3 integrated circuits ("chips") from Integrated Device Technology. The Dolphin Express PX product line, introduced in 2016, is based on PCI Express Gen3 chipsets from

Broadcom Broadcom Inc. is an American designer, developer, manufacturer and global supplier of a wide range of semiconductor and infrastructure software products. Broadcom's product offerings serve the data center, networking, software, broadband, wirel ...

. IX and PX implements a PCIe-native switched-topology technology. The SISCI application programming interface (API) was developed for the

shared memory In computer science, shared memory is memory that may be simultaneously accessed by multiple programs with an intent to provide communication among them or avoid redundant copies. Shared memory is an efficient means of passing data between progr ...

SCI hardware. With the introduction of the PX, IX, and DX-line of products, the API was expanded to support features like reflective memory, multicast and PCIe peer-to-peer communication. SuperSockets is a software platform for Dolphin Express providing a low latency, high throughput implementation of the

Berkeley sockets Berkeley sockets is an application programming interface (API) for Internet sockets and Unix domain sockets, used for inter-process communication (IPC). It is commonly implemented as a library of linkable modules. It originated with the 4.2BS ...

and Winsock APIs. It was introduced in 2007. SmartIO has been used to share GPUs, NVMe drives, and other devices in a PCIe network.

References

External links

* Computer companies of Norway {{Norway-company-stub