At the Intel Developer Forum in San Jose, CA this week, a demonstration of InfiniBand interoperability from multiple vendors featured an Intel-led InfiniBand interoperability demonstration. The demonstration featured products from a number of InfiniBand vendors running the SourceForge-hosted open source InfiniBand software… stack for Linux on a combination of Intel Xeon and Itanium II processor based server platforms, according to a statement released today by the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA).

What is InfiniBand?

The following is an excerpt from the Linux InfiniBand Project website . . .

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is an industry standard that defines a new high-speed switched fabric subsystem designed to connect processor nodes and I/O nodes to form a system area network. This new interconnect method moves away from the local transaction-based I/O model across busses to a remote message-passing model across channels. The architecture is independent of the host operating system (OS) and the processor platform.

IBA provides both reliable and unreliable transport mechanisms in which messages are enqueued for delivery between end systems. Hardware transport protocols are defined that support reliable and unreliable messaging (send/receive), and memory manipulation semantics (e.g., RDMA read/write) without software intervention in the data transfer path.

The InfiniBand specification primarily defines the hardware electrical, mechanical, link-level, and management aspects of an InfiniBand fabric, but does not define the lowest layers of the operating system stack needed to communicate over an InfiniBand fabric. The remainder of the operating system stack to support storage, networking, IPC, and systems management is left to the operating system vendor for definition. More on the InfiniBand architecture can be found here.

Linux InfiniBand Project

The Linux InfiniBand Project is a collection of sub-projects and activities all focused around the common goal of providing the operating system software components needed to support an InfiniBand fabric, specifically for the Linux operating system. The architecture for several of these components is further influenced by existing and emerging standards that define uniform protocols for components of the operating system. Examples here are emerging protocols like Internet Protocol over InfiniBand (IPoIB) and the SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) and proposed definitions for standard InfiniBand transport and driver APIs.

This project is focused on promoting, enabling and delivering the software components needed to support an InfiniBand fabric for the Linux operating system.

The Linux InfiniBand Project is hosted at SourceForge.

 
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