An Analysis of HyperTransport and Seastar Data Rates on Red Storm.

The Red Storm high-speed network system chip, Seastar, uses the HyperTransport (HT) interface to communicate with an on-board Opteron processor. An analysis is presented for a) the theoretical maximum sustained data rate for an 800 MHz, 16-bit HT implementation, b) the theoretical maximum sustained data rate for the Seastar link interface, and c) the measured maximum sustained bandwidths from readily accessible HT platforms, which include Red storm, Cray’s XD1 and a Hewlett-Packard DL145 dual-Opteron server.