Sun InfiniBand Dual Port 4x Quad Data Rate (QDR) PCIe Low Profile Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and the Sun InfiniBand Dual port 4x QDR PCI-E Express Module HCA are built using Mellanox ConnectX silicon, delivering QDR over four times than copper and optical interconnects, Sun reports.

The ConnectX architecture supports eight lane PCI Express Base v2.0 compliant/v1.1 compatible interfaces as the host interface. For network and storage connectivity, it supports two network ports. The InfiniBand port supports Single, Double, and Quad Rates (SDR, DDR, QDR) delivering 10, 20Gb/s, and 40 Gbps full duplex bandwidth.

Sun's QDR InfiniBand products enable Sun to offer RDMA-based high-performance, low-latency I/O interconnect technology for its blade and rack mount server platforms. RDMA or Remote Memory Direct Access is an approach to increasing memory and I/O bandwidth while reducing latency. RDMA is a set of protocols that enable movement of data from the memory of one CPU directly into the memory of another CPU without involving the operating system of either system. By bypassing the kernel, RDMA eliminates copying operations and reduces host CPU usage.

Support of RDMA and OS Bypass technologies reduces memory copy overheads and improves CPU utilization. This allows CPU to have more cycles for compute intensive operations and applications run with reduced latency, thereby improving overall system performance.

FEATURES

Network Acceleration

• TCP, UDP, IP Checksum Offload
• Large Send Offload
• Receive Side Scaling
• Split header and payload processing
• Multiple send and receive queues
• Interrupt moderation
• PCI Express MSI-X
• Remote DMA
• Reliable and unreliable connected modes
• IB Hardware Transport and TCP/IP Stateless Offload
• Marking, shaping and queuing (including IEEE 802.1p and DiffServ)
• 8 queues per port for end-to-end congestion control
• Granular flow control

High Availability & Manageability

• PXE compliant remote boot
• ASF and IPMI pass-through
• Counters for popular MIBS

Supported Platforms

• Sun IB-HCA Dual port 4x QDR PCI-E ExpressModule: Sun Blade 6000 and 6048

• Sun IB-HCA Dual port 4x QDR PCI-E Low Profile adapter: Sun Fire X2250, X2270, X4170, X4270, and X4275

Supported Operating Systems

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL): -u7 32/64 bit, 5.1 (on PCIe Gen-1 platforms), 5.2, 5.3

• Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10: SP1 (on PCIe Gen-1 Platforms) and SP2

Supported Standards and Protocols

• Standards: IBTA v1.2 compatible design and PCIe Base 2.0 compliant/1.1 compatible

• Protocols: MPI (Message Passing Interface), SDP (Sockets Direct Protocol), RDS (Reliable Datagram Service), IPoIB(IP over IB), uDAPL(user Direct Access Programming Library), and NFSoRDMA (NFS over Remote DMA)

Compatibility

This product can work with any Sun or 3rd party InfiniBand switch. For switches that do not support QDR, adapter cables are available from a number of suppliers that adapt the QDR connector on the HCA (QSFP) to the SDR/DDR connector on the switch (CX-4).

More Information

Sun Networking Technologies

Sun Blade Servers

Sun x64 Systems

Sun Launches Open Network Systems With Xeon 5500-Based Servers

IB QDR and Nehalem (updated) - from the blog of Ted H. Kim [...read more...]

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