The BYNET

The BYNET is a bus that loosely couples all the SMP nodes into a multinode system.  The BYNET also possesses high-speed logic arrays that provide bi-directional broadcast, multicast, and point-to-point communication and merge functions.

A multinode system has two BYNETs.  This both creates a fault tolerant environment and provides for enhanced interprocessor communication.  When BYNET traffic becomes particularly heavy, the two BYNETs can handle separate (rather than redundant) traffic.  The machine provides load balancing software to optimize this process.

The total bandwidth for each network link to a processor node is 10 Mbytes.  Because there are 2 network links per node and because the bandwidth is linearly scalable, the total throughput available for each node is 20 Mbytes.

The BYNET software also provides a standard TCP/IP interface for communication among the SMP nodes (see figure below).