IBM 88553RX, Installation Manual

Page: 81 / 232

Chapter 3. Planning
67
Supervisor Adapter for out-of-band management, as described in “The
Remote Supervisor Adapter” on page 177.
3.2.1 SMP Expansion connectivity
This section describes multi-node cabling. A node is one of multiple servers in a
configuration interconnected through the SMP Expansion Ports to share system
resources. The multi-node configuration is described in “Configuring scalable
partitions” on page 131.
There are two optional SMP Expansion cable kits available to connect the SMP
Expansion Port connectors:
Four-way to 8-way Scalability Kit, comes with two 2.5 m SMP Expansion
cables (part number 73P9911)
Eight-way to 16-way Supplemental Kit, comes with three 2.5 m SMP
Expansion cables and one 3.5 m SMP Expansion cable (part number
73P9715)
Follow these recommendations in each server before cabling:
Update the system abstraction layer/extensible firmware interface (SAL/EFI)
firmware.
Update the service-processor firmware.
These are available from the x455 driver matrix:
http://www.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-53575.html
Multinode event timing
Multinode configurations have different clock sources driving processors in each
node. Therefore, the processor time stamp counter (TSC) should not be used by
operating systems or applications for global system event timing. Applications
should use an OS API to perform event timing.
Operating systems should use the Cyclone performance counter in node 0 to
implement system event timing functions.
Note: Only two-node and four-node configurations are supported.