Infiniband

InfiniBand networking is an industry standard, channel-based, point-to-point switched fabric interconnect for high-performance networks. InfiniBand networks provide high-bandwidth, low-latency, and reliability with failover in a scalable high-performance network with built in security and quality of service. InfiniBand can be used to provide a high speed interconnect from compute nodes to storage systems.

InfiniBand is the highest-speed lowest latency interconnect. InfiniBand has become the de-facto interconnect of choice for high performance computing. InfiniBand uses a switched fabric. Its features include quality of service and fail-over, and it is designed to be highly scalable. The InfiniBand architecture allows for connection between processor nodes and high performance I/O nodes such as storage devices. InfiniBand currently has maximum throughput of 40 GB/s (QDR), and has the lowest latency (< 1 μs). If your applications are latency or I/O bound, InfiniBand may be an excellent choice.

InfiniBand also supports other protocols to facilitate capabilities such as access to remote memory, sockets, and storage. Many gateway solutions are available that allow an InfiniBand network to connect to your existing Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet Infrastructure and other Enterprise networks if needed.

InfiniBand utilizes a serial (bit-at-a-time) bus design. InfiniBand's message passing I/O fabric provides reliability and scalability without the increasing latencies that older architectures experience as workload increases. More technical information regarding InfiniBand can be found at (http://www.infinibandta.org/specs/faq/ .)