Click on the image to enlarge

This is a front shot of our E10k. In the bottom section you see the system controller on the left, followed to the right by 8 system boards. In the top section you see on the left the power conditioning and power supplies shelf, and on the right a 19" rack with I/O components:
- power sequencers
- network hubs
- StorEdge D1000 HDD tray
The back side of the machine looks the same in the bottom section, i.e. one system controller and 8 system boards. The top section has the same power supply shelf as the front side, but the I/O rack is empty in our case. Not shown is an UltraSparc 5 workstation used as the SSP (System Service Processor).

The system buildup is modular as well as redundant to the extreme. There is no single point of failure. This is unique among all the systems at Cray-Cyber. Starting with the power cords (4, of which 1 may fail), power conditioners (4, of which 1 may fail), power supplies (8, of which 2 may fail), fan trays (16, of which 4 may fail), via system controllers (2, of which 1 may fail), and backplane (1, of which 1/2 may fail) and up to the system boards (16, of which several may fail depending upon software / peripherals configuration) everything is redundant and reconfigurable, and all components are plug-exchangeable. In case of failure either the system will continue running without any interruption or will easily be reconfigured.

Click on the image to enlarge

This is a system board for the E10k. You see at the bottom the 4 UltraSparc II 400 MHz processors with 8 MB cache each. On the top left you see 4 banks of dynamic RAM totalling 4 GByte (128 MByte DIMMs). On the top right you see 4 SBUS slots (2x 100 MB/sec) which may be configured with a variety of I/O-interface cards, like ATM, FibreChannel, Quad Fast Ethernet, or various SCSI variants.

Click on the image to enlarge

This is the back side of the system board for the E10k. You see at the left the DC-DC power converters, generating local low voltages from the 48 VDC intermediate supply. On the right and on the bottom you see the 18 ASICs with their heat sinks used for system interconnection, i.e. address and data routing as well as cache snooping, memory control, and I/O control. The smaller chips are duplicate cache tag memories used for snooping.

Click on the image to enlarge

This is the midplane for the E10k. You see the connectors for the system boards, and in between (behind the heatsinks) the 34 gate arrays of the midplane interconnect. This interconnect consists of four address busses mostly used for cache snooping and two 8-byte (72 bit including ECC) data busses per system board. The 16 system board interconnect is a full non-blocking crossbar with 1600 MB/sec per port. The total max bandwidth of this crossbar interconnect therefore is 25.6 GB/sec. The midplane has the same set of connectors from both sides for a total of 16 system boards plus two system controllers (one redundant).