XC50 Aries Network Architecture

There are 4 dual socket nodes on blade, connected to a single Aries (switch) chip, and there are 16 Aries chips in a chassis connected to the backplane. On Māui, this implies each chassis contains 64 nodes, or 2,560 Skylake cores. There are 3 chassis in an XC50 cabinet, and two XC50 cabinets are an Electrical "group". Māui has 1.5 groups.

The performance characteristics are:

1. Intra-Chassis
   1. Backplane
   2. 15 links in the backplane
   3. Rank 1 (green) Network
   4. 14 Gbps
2. Intra-group
   1. Copper cables
   2. 15 links in 5 connectors
   3. Rank 2 (black) Network
   4. 14 Gbps
3. Inter-group links
   1. Optical
   2. 10 links in 5 connectors
   3. Rank 3 (blue) Network
   4. 12.5 Gbps

The centrepiece of the Aries network is dynamic routing through a large variety of different routes from Aries A to Aries B. Therewith the effective bandwidth is increased significantly. These dynamic routing on alternative paths is applied on all 3 levels of the network.