SmartIO with SISCI

The SISCI SmartIO functions provides an API for low level access to PCIe devices in the cluster. It can be used to write user space drivers that operate on devices located anywhere in the cluster. Unlike, device lending, multiple users can ‘borrow’ the same device at the same time. This allows distributed device drivers to be created. The SmartIO API is compatible with the rest of the SISCI API so that the ‘normal’ SISCI functions can be used when writing device drivers, for instance this allows the driver instances to communicate with each other. The DMA engine on the NTB adapter can also be used to move data to and from a SmartIO device.

Please refer to Writing drivers with SmartIO to learn how to write a device driver using SISCI.

System Requirements

• The cluster nodes must be a supported platform.

• The cluster nodes must run a supported operating system.

• You must be prepared to write a device driver yourself.

Additional System Considerations

• The NTB prefetchable size limits the total size of SISCI segments that a given node can map.

• Consider enabling IOMMU on the cluster nodes to protect against rogue DMA accesses from the device.