Managing Superdome Complexes: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Overview of the Superdome System Environment

HP Superdome System Hardware Components

Chapter 1 19

• I/O Chassis

HP Superdome servers can contain up to four 12-slot I/O chassis per

Superdome cabinet.

For the ﬁrst release, each I/O chassis provides 12 PCI card slots and

resides within the same system cabinet as the cells. Each I/O chassis

is connected by cables to one of the cells in the same cabinet as the I/O

chassis.

The HP Superdome cabinet contains two I/O bays, each of which

supports up to two 12-slot I/O chassis. I/O bay 0 is in the front of the

cabinet, and I/O bay 1 is in the cabinet’s rear.

Within each I/O bay, the left I/O chassis is chassis 1, and the right I/O

chassis is chassis 3. (Chassis numbers 0 and 4 are reserved for future

support of 6-slot PCI chassis.)

PCI cards reside in the same cabinet as the cells and I/O chassis.

However, all I/O devices (hard disks, DVD-ROM devices) must reside

in an external cabinet.

Note that PCI slot numbers do not always correspond to the

associated HP-UX hardware path. See “HP Superdome PCI I/O Slots

and Hardware Paths” on page 29.

In each I/O chassis, PCI slots 4 to 7 provide 4xPCI (66 MHz, 400

Mbytes/sec.), and all others (slots 0 to 3 and 8 to 11) provide 2xPCI

(33 MHz, 200 Mbytes/sec.).

In Superdome 12-slot I/O chassis, slots 0–6 share one of the chassis’s

I/O runway busses and slots 7–11 share the other I/O runway bus in

the chassis.

Following the ﬁrst release, other Superdome I/O options will be

available. External I/O expansion cabinets will provide room for

additional I/O chassis. Also, when released, 6-slot I/O chassis also will

be supported, with up to eight 6-slot I/O chassis within each

Superdome cabinet.

• Cables

The two primary types of cables are: cell-to-I/O cables (“RIO cables”)

and backplane-connection cables (“Flex cables”).

In order to make I/O accessible to the partitions you conﬁgure, you or

your HP service representative must physically connect each I/O

chassis to a cell within the cabinet using RIO cables.