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Linux Infiniband rig clocks 1.3GB/s over NFS-RDMA

Aug 8, 2007 — by LinuxDevices Staff — from the LinuxDevices Archive — 3 views

Mellanox Technologies has introduced Linux NFS-RDMA (network file system over remote direct memory access) support for its Infiniband adapters. The company claims its NFS-RDMA support delivers Infiniband read and write throughputs of 1.3GB/sec and 600MB/sec, respectively, over a single InfiniBand link, “a ten-fold improvement over existing NFS over Gigabit Ethernet.”

InfiniBand is a high-speed I/O… bus aimed at servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage, and embedded systems applications. The InfiniBand Trade Association characterizes the standard as “a true fabric architecture that leverages switched, point-to-point channels with data transfers up to 120 gigabits per second, both in chassis backplane applications as well as through external copper and optical fiber connections.”

Mellanox says its open-source Linux NVS-RDMA implementation is compatible with the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.2, a validated version of the open-source OpenFabrics software stack. Mellanox's NVS-RDMA stack is optimized for its MTD2000 Storage Platform, and provides the “software infrastructure and device driver support for Mellanox InfiniBand devices,” the company said in a statement.


Mellanox's MTD2000 storage platform


InfiniHost III adapter
(Click to enlarge)

The company claims its NVS-RDMA stack to have demonstrated “unprecedented network file system performance” in its internal benchmarks. The test setup is described as follows:

“Using the Mellanox MTD2000 storage platform reference design (based on Intel CPUs, Mellanox InfiniHost III adapters, OFED 1.2, RHEL5 or SLES 10 SP1) as an NFS-RDMA server, and up to four NFS-RDMA clients, read performance of 1.3GB/s has been achieved for file sizes ranging from 64 to 1024 megabytes, and write performance of 550 to 590MB/s for file sizes ranging from 64 to 512 megabytes (using the IOzone file system benchmark). Also, read and write throughput is maintained for all record sizes ranging from 4 kilobytes to 512 kilobytes.”

Mellanox's Linux NFS-RDMA stack is released in the form of a free, open-source software development kit (SDK), available for download on its website here. The stack is derived from the SourceForge NFS-RDMA project code base, which is released under a BSD-style license.

Mellanox says it is demonstrating its Linux NFS-RDMA stack this week at LinuxWorld in San Francisco.


 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.



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