A PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT TO CONTROL SWITCHING NETWORKS BASED ON STC104 PACKET ROUTING CHIP

Abstract The software environment used to control a large switching architecture based on SGS-Thomson STC104 (an asynchronous 32-way dynamic packet routing chip) is presented. We are evaluating this switching technology for large scale, real-time parallel systems. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) written as a multi-thread application in Java allows to set the switch configuration and to continuously monitor the state of each link. This GUI connects to a multi-thread server via TCP/IP sockets. The server is running on a PC-Linux system and implements the virtual channel protocol in communicating with the STC104 switching units using the Data Strobe link or the VME bus. Linux I/O drivers to control the Data Strobe link parallel adaptor (STC101) were developed. For each client the server creates a new thread and allocates a new socket for communications. The Java code of the GUI may be transferred to any client using the http protocol providing a user friendly interface to the system with real-time monitoring which is also platform independent.