US Patent 9792243 Computer architecture to provide flexibility and/or scalability

Apparatus, systems, and/or methods may include a peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) link to directly couple a slot with a network fabric. The slot may be defined by a surface and/or may accommodate a hardware module. A rack unit implementation may be utilized, such as a one rack unit (1 U) implementation, a four rack unit (4 U) implementation, and so on. The network fabric may be utilized when hardware modules communicate across the PCIe link, may be bypassed when hardware modules communicate across an additional PCIe link, and so on. The PCIe link may include a direct connect point-to-point PCIe link, a dual star PCIe link, and so on. In addition, the PCIe link may be utilized in a rack-scale architecture.