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". Maui has 1.5 groups.
The performance characteristics are:
- Intra-Chassis
- Backplane
- 15 links in the backplane
- Rank 1 (green) Network
- 14 Gbps
- Intra-group
- Copper cables
- 15 links in 5 connectors
- Rank 2 (black) Network
- 14 Gbps
- Inter-group links
- Optical
- 10 links in 5 connectors
- Rank 3 (blue) Network
- 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.