Mellanox Advances Open Source InfiniBand Software

Mellanox Technologies today announced it will join Intel in working to advance industry standard, hardware-independent, open source InfiniBand software interfaces. Mellanox is supporting the InfiniBand verbs, Access Layer APIs and upper level protocols being developed in the SourceForge open source environment. Mellanox will provide device drivers for the InfiniHost Host Channel Adapters into the Source Forge forum and will continue to provide driver updates and other software solutions as they become available. These efforts by Mellanox complement Intel’s continued InfiniBand platform development efforts. The availability of a full suite of common industry standard interfaces and protocols accelerates the widespread adoption of InfiniBand in the data center and allows InfiniBand software to become a part of standard enterprise Linux distributions.

“Providing a rich set of software protocols is a key component of accelerating the adoption of InfiniBand in the data center,” said Michael Kagan, vice president of architecture for Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. “Mellanox is committed to ensuring the broadest software support for our InfiniBand host and target channel adapters and switches across a range of operating system environments.”

The SourceForge open source InfiniBand software project provides a forum for collaborative development of hardware independent, low level access layer interfaces, as well as industry standards upper level protocols. Upper level protocols support includes industry standard solutions for Open SM subnet management, IPoverIB, Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), and SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP). These software solutions provide greatly enhanced performance for clustering, storage, and communication applications while simultaneously providing seamless integration into existing IP based data center environments.

“The Source Forge effort is well underway in delivering InfiniBand software stack support for Linux,” said Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group. “Accelerating software support for the Mellanox InfiniHost HCA is one key element to enable InfiniBand fabric connectivity to Intel architecture server platforms.”

The InfiniBand Architecture is the only 10Gb/sec ultra low latency clustering, communication and storage interconnect in the market today. Based on an industry standard with reliability, availability, serviceability and manageability features designed in from the ground up, InfiniBand provides the most robust data center interconnect solution available. These attributes greatly improve TCO for the data center. Low cost InfiniBand silicon is shipping today that supports 10Gb/sec RDMA transfers and with its approved specification for 30Gb/sec. According to Mellanox, InfiniBand is at least a generation ahead of competing fabric technologies today and for the foreseeable future.