Infiniband
InfiniBand is a type of communications link for data flow between processors and I/O devices throughput of up to 2.5 gigabytes per second and support for up to 64,000 addressable devices and includes scalability, quality of service (QoS) and failover. InfiniBand is a server connect in high-performance computing (HPC) environments.
The serial bus can carry multiple channels of data at the same time in a multiplexing signal. InfiniBand also supports multiple memory areas, each of which can addressed by both processors and storage devices.
The InfiniBand Trade Association views the bus itself as a switch determining the route a given message follows in getting to its destination address. InfiniBand uses Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) or a limitless amount of device expansion.(1)
InfiniBand uses a switched fabric topology, as opposed to a hierarchical switched network like traditional Ethernet architectures, although emerging Ethernet fabric architectures propose many benefits which could see Ethernet replace Infiniband. Most of the network topologies are Fat-Tree (Clos), mesh or 3D-Torus. Recent papers (ISCA'10) demonstrated butterfly topologies as well.(2)
Like the channel model (mainframe) all transmission begins or ends with a channel adapter. Each processor has a host channel adapter (HCA) and each peripheral device has a target channel adapter (TCA) to exchange information that ensures security.(1)
InfiniBand transmits data in packets of up to 4 KB that are taken together to form a message. A message can be: a direct memory access read from or, write to, a remote node (RDMA), a channel send or receive, a transaction-based operation (that can be reversed), a multicast transmission, or an atomic operation(2)
The InfiniBand specification comes from merging two competing designs, Future I/O, developed by Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard, with Next Generation I/O, developed by Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems.(1)
(1) http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/InfiniBand
(2) "The InfiniBand roadmap gets redrawn". Gazettabyte. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 2, 2010 AT 3:35PM. Retrieved 2011-10-11.
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