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How did these work? The article says you could ssh into them, so they all had their own RAM and ran their own individual os? I don't think the CPUs were multi socket capable.

How did they boot? Network? So the pcie connection was essentially just for networking?

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Google: PCIe Non-Transparent Bridge

they're independent systems with a special PCIe switch that looks like an end device to all participants and allows shuffling data around at PCIe performance

(the NTB function is integrated on some Intel processors AFAIK, but it may also be a separate chip)

This is what I'm curious about as well. My poorly educated guess is that maybe these are just meant to process specific tasks sent to them from the host machine over SSH.

But then why have connectivity through both Ethernet and PCI-E?

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