Dolphin Interconnect Solutions

Dolphin Interconnect Solutions is a privately held manufacturer of high-speed data communication systems headquartered in Oslo, Norway 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 (SCI) products from Norsk Data, by implementing customer-specific technology, as well as providing Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) and later PCIe boards for commodity and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Sun Microsystems 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, and led by Tim Miller.
StarFabric provides a PCI-based interconnect running over standard Ethernet 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 (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. IX and PX implements a PCIe-native switched-topology technology.

The SISCI application programming interface (API) was developed for the shared memory 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 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

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Computer companies of Norway

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