Three technical updates

We’ve managed to post 3 new “technical nuggets” to the web site - little snippets of technical information about and around Enzian, which are quicker to write and post than full documentation, but will hopefully find themselves into the user manuals in due course:

1. How fast is ECI, really?: we preview some of the performance figures from our upcoming ASPLOS paper, comparing raw performance of ECI, the coherence link between the CPU and FPGA in Enzian, with that achievable with PCIe Gen3 x16 accelerator cards. Turns out, we’re mostly faster.

2. Booting Enzian pt. 1: The BMC: the first part of a series of articles about what happens when we want to boot an Enzian system. This focuses on just booting the Board Management Controller (BMC), which needs to be done well before we can even power up most of the rest of the main board.

3. The Enzian rear panel: a tour of the connectors on the back of a 2U rackmount Enzian, and what they can be used for: networking, JTAG, USB, UARTS, etc.