6 The T9000 Farm

6.7 Communication requirements

Each farm worker had the following communication requirements:

Host I/O. All workers must be able to communicate status information to the host SUN workstation
Connection to the histogram collector
Access to experimental data
Access to all six output Exabytes
Access to Calibration Data via a Calibration Server.

All these requirements were satisfied by using the C104 network in combination with the T805/C100 interfaces as shown in Fig. .

The host link to a SUN workstation is slow and a probable bottleneck, hence it was not feasible to have all of the workers read the calibration files over the host link. Therefore, an up-to-date copy of the calibration files was stored on a single T9000 (the Calibration Server) which was then accessed by all other workers via the C104 network. Thus, only one T9000 was required to load the calibration files over the host link.

All workers required access to the host to allow status information to be displayed. To facilitate this an I/O multiplexer was implemented. It took as input all I/O requests from the workers and multiplexed them onto the single link to the host.

Application of T9000 to CPLEAR - 09 NOV 95

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