INFINIBAND

 

Group 3

 

Casey Bauer, Hannah McMahon, John Walls, William Hunter, and Mary Daniels

 

Key Words:  Node, Fabric, HCA, TCA, Routers, Switches, Third-Party I/O

 

Infiniband is a developing Internet technology that has the ability to solve limitation problems that come with todayÕs I/O subsystems. The best Internet technologies have the transfer speed of around 500 megabytes per second. Infiniband technology has expectations of six gigabytes per second transfer speed. The architecture of Infiniband is based on a serial, switch fabric that defines much higher link bandwidths than available using the shared bus architecture. Another problem, which Infiniband can solve, is scalability (distance between users or resources), expandability, and fault tolerance limitations faced when using the shared bus architecture. Infiniband will be extremely beneficial to organizations by providing round the clock availability of reliable data through its routine system, and enabling data to be transferred at a much faster rate.  In addition, available storage can be partitioned around many servers to benefit security and management tasks. These benefits are all provided at a lower cost.

 

The Infiniband Trade Association (ITA) was formed in August of 1999, by seven industry leaders: Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems. Intel is currently working on its own prototype of Infiniband technology through their interoperability labs. The goal of the seven members of the ITA was to design an I/O subsystem to replace the limited server machines of the shared bus architecture. With the help of its eleven sponsoring member and over two hundred member companies ITA was able to release the first version of Infiniband very quickly and with the elimination of market confusion form competitors.

 

Infiniband is unlike many of its predecessors with due capabilities of Òproviding operating system and hardware platform interoperability while improving system configurations. (snwonline.com)Ó The simplest configuration of an Infiniband installation  has two or more host devices, nodes, are connected through the fabric by channel adaptors. Channel adaptors may be either Host Channel Adaptors (HCAs) or Target Channel Adaptors (TCAs). The HCA is where Infiniband is integrated into the operating system of the server or desktop machine. TCAs are used in I/O devices such as a RAID subsystem or JBOD subsystem. Infiniband fabric allows multiple servers to be linked together for a better flow within the connected servers. An unseen benefit of this fabric is that its technology has the ability to prevent data congestion within the channel, allowing data to be transferred at its optimal level. Routers and switches are similar in that they both simply move packets between their ports. A switch uses Local IDs (LIDs) to transfer packets from the source to the receiver. Routers use globally unique identifiers (GIDs) to transfer packets across domains. Routers are used to form Òlarger multi-domain system area networksÓ by interconnecting two or more subnets.

 

Each connection of a node, switch, and router forms a point-to-point, serial connection which is the difference that provides so many benefits.  In the serial connection, only four connections are needed, unlike the Òwide parallel connection of the PCI bus.Ó  Less work is put on the bus and delays due to Òheavy loading conditionsÓ will become less of a problem. Much higher bandwidths are reached because of the shorter connections between hosts and I/O devices within an Infiniband Data Center. Performance and reliability benefits are achieved by the multiple paths available to connect sources to their destinations. 

 

As e-commerce and e-business continue to grow, more data has to be delivered to more users. Infiniband will help this data move quicker and with higher reliability and quality than has been available in the past. The difference between how the Infiniband technology does this, compared to traditional networking protocols is that the Infiniband defines the send/receive operations as operating against queue pairs. Also, businesses will be able to achieve better performance at a lower cost because system architects have come up with the concept of clustering, where two or more servers are connected together to for a single server.             

 

The connection technology that Infiniband can provide is far greater than just in the business intelligence area. For example, in the film and television aspect of technology, Infiniband can save time and money. On average, 4 minutes and 45 second of digital video footage is equal to one gigabyte of hard disk space. Across network connections, Infiniband has a range of transfer speed between 500 megabytes and six gigabytes per second. Using two hours (120 minutes) of digital video footage, which equals 25.26 gigabytes of hard disk space as an example, Infiniband can send 25.26 gigabytes of data over a network between 50 seconds and four seconds. This type of technology can increase productivity and enable even the largest of data files to be transferred within seconds on access.

 

Infiniband has the capability to change Internet technology as we know it; making it cheaper, allow users to have increased productivity, enhance the connection speeds of multiple servers in a network, and have a more reliable source of data transfer. With so much support for this new I/O standard architecture, Infiniband development has moved quickly from specification to actual products in the market very successfully. Very soon, old networking protocols will be a thing of the past.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

 

OÕReilly Network: An Introduction to the Infiniband Architecture. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2006 from

    http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/02/04/windows.html

 

Storage Networking World Online – Tech Edge – Infiniband I/O standard will enhance storage networking. (April 9, 2001). Retrieved February 7, 2006 from

   http://www.snwonline.com/tech_edge/04-09-01_infiniband.asp

 

The DV, DVCAM, & DVCPRO Formats – tech details, FAQ, and links. (n.d.). Retrieved February 7, 2006

   http://www.videouniversity.com/dvformat.htm

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Questions about Infiniband

 

1.     Which of following is not part of the Infiniband Trade Association (ITA)?

A.   Compaq                                            B. Dell

C.   IBM                                                 D. Apple

 

2.     Which of the following companyÕs currently has a prototype for Infiniband technologies?

A.   Microsoft                                         B. Apple

C.  Adobe                                               D. Intel

 

3.     What is an example of a channel adapter involved with Infiniband?

A.   HCA                                                B. TCA

C.  FCE                                                  D. All of the above

 

4.     What is another term for a host device?

A.   Router                                              B. Fabric

B.    Node                                                D. None of the above

 

5.     What is the goal of the Infiniband Trade Association (ITA)?

A.   To design an I/O subsystem that makes music downloading a lot faster than it has been before

B.    Keep PCÕs from ÒfreezingÓ or ÒcrashingÓ

C.    Design an I/O subsystem to replace the limited server machines of the shared bus architecture.

D.   Both B and C.

 

6.     What does a switch use to transfer data packets from the source to the receiver?

A.   I/O fabric                                          B. Local IDÕs (LIDs)

C.  Globally Unique Identifiers (GIDs) D. RAID

 

7.     What type of connection does the node(s), switch, and router form?

A.   Front-to-back                                   B. There is no connection

C.  Side-to-side                                      D. point-to-point