About InfiniBand™
InfiniBand is an industry-standard specification that defines an input/output architecture used to interconnect servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems.
A true fabric architecture, InfiniBand leverages switched, point-to-point channels with data transfers that generally lead the industry, both in chassis backplane applications as well as through external copper and optical fiber connections. Reliable messaging (send/receive) and memory manipulation semantics (RDMA) without software intervention in the data movement path ensure the lowest latency and highest application performance.
This low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect requires only minimal processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. As a mature and field-proven technology, InfiniBand is used in thousands of data centers, high-performance compute clusters and embedded applications that scale from two nodes up to clusters utilizing thousands of nodes. Through the availability of long reach InfiniBand over Metro and WAN technologies, InfiniBand is able to efficiently move large data between data centers across the campus to around the globe.
HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand is shipping today, and InfiniBand has a robust roadmap defining increasing speeds well into the future. The current roadmap shows a projected demand for increasingly higher bandwidth with new NDR 1.2Tb/s InfiniBand products planned for 2020.
Advantages
Superior performance: Superior performance: Most world’s fastest commercially available supercomputers leverage the InfiniBand interconnect, which currently represents 77% of new HPC systems on the TOP500 List.
Low-latency: InfiniBand’s ultra-low latencies, with measured delays of 1µs end to end, greatly accelerate many data center and high performance computing (HPC) applications.
High-efficiency: InfiniBand provides direct support of advanced reliable transport protocols such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) to enhance the efficiency of customer workload processing.
Cost effectiveness: InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and switches are very competitively priced and create a compelling price/performance advantage over alternative technologies.
Fabric consolidation and low energy usage: InfiniBand can consolidate networking, clustering, and storage data over a single fabric which significantly lowers the overall power, real estate and management overhead required for servers and storage.
Reliable, stable connections: InfiniBand is perfectly suited to meet the mission-critical needs of today’s enterprise by enabling fully redundant and lossless I/O fabrics, with automatic path failover and link layer multi-pathing abilities to meet the highest levels of availability.
Data integrity: InfiniBand enables the highest levels of data integrity by performing cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) at each fabric hop and end to end across the fabric to ensure the data is correctly transferred.
Rich, growing ecosystem: InfiniBand is at the center of an ecosystem that includes open-source software distribution from the OpenFabrics Alliance, innovative and cost-effective cabling, and long-haul solutions that reach outside the data center and across the globe.
Highly interoperable environment: InfiniBand compliance testing conducted by the IBTA, combined with interoperability testing conducted by the OpenFabrics Alliance, results in a highly interoperable environment, which benefits end users in terms of product choice and vendor independence.