Resource Management

Dynamic System Domains

DSDs are Starfire's independent hardware entities formed by the logical association of system boards. DSD is the preferred term when referring to Starfire domains because the generic term “domain” is overused by the industry to reflect different applications (for example, mail servers, name servers, and Microsoft Windows NT have distinct representations of “domains”).

The current second generation Starfire DSD technology was originally introduced in 1995 with the Cray CS6400 machine (it later became the Sun CS6400 server). DSDs were originally inspired by the Multiple Domain Feature™ (MDF™) hardware capability introduced by Amdahl® Corporation in 1985, which allowed CPU and I/O resources on their mainframes to be allocated ...