Dolphin Interconnect Solutions
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Dolphin Interconnect Solutions is a privately held manufacturer of high-speed
data communication Data transmission and data reception or, more broadly, data communication or digital communications is the transfer and reception of data in the form of a digital bitstream or a digitized analog signal transmitted over a point-to-point or ...
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 ...
,
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 the ...
and
Woodsville, New Hampshire Woodsville is a census-designated place (CDP) and the largest village in the town of Haverhill in Grafton County, New Hampshire, United States, along the Connecticut River at the mouth of the Ammonoosuc River. The population was 1,431 at the 2 ...
, USA. The technology of Dolphin was based on development work at
Norsk Data Norsk Data was a minicomputer manufacturer located in Oslo, Norway. Existing from 1967 to 1998, it had its most active period from the early 1970s to the late 1980s. At the company's peak in 1987, it was the second largest company in Norway and em ...
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 in ...
(SCI) products from Norsk Data, by implementing customer-specific technology, as well as providing Peripheral Component Interconnect (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 ...
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 mult ...
(HPC) systems. Sun Microsystems agreed to re-sell Dolphin's SCI interfaces for the
SBus SBus is a computer bus system that was used in most SPARC-based computers (including all SPARCstations) from Sun Microsystems and others during the 1990s. It was introduced by Sun in 1989 to be a high-speed bus counterpart to their high-speed S ...
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, 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 1 ...
Category 5 cables. 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 Integrated Device Technology, Inc., is an American corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and markets low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for the advanced communications, com ...
. 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 Reflective memory is a means to share common data between different and independent systems deterministically. Such systems using a common reflective memory form a reflective memory network which is a deterministic one, when any system of the net ...
, 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 4.2BSD ...
and
Winsock In computing, the Windows Sockets API (WSA), later shortened to Winsock, is an application programming interface (API) that defines how Windows network application software should access network services, especially TCP/IP. It defines a standar ...
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