INDUSTRY

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) today announced completion of InfiniBand architecture specification version 1.2, which introduces double- and quad signaling rates extending the available bandwidth to up to 120Gbps in each direction. Additional revisions include new features for congestion management, configuration management, device management and extensions to InfiniBand's verbs architecture that allow future RDMA implementations to remain consistent with InfiniBand. "The revised InfiniBand specification will open up new levels of performance for IT managers seeking to exploit the advantages of the I/O standard," said Kevin Deierling, Mellanox vice president and IBTA Steering Committee representative. "At speeds up to 120 Gbps, InfiniBand continues to reign as the performance leader for standards-based server interconnects with a roadmap of supported bandwidths to meet the needs of future HPC and datacenter requirements. Additional annexes and verbs extensions provide the assurance of greater performance and interoperability." Verbs extensions and annexes The verbs extensions in the revised specification add features such as a shared receive queue and an enhanced memory management scheme. They also align InfiniBand with verbs from the RDMA Consortium so that the interfaces remain consistent, providing a greater degree of interoperability. The new configuration management and device management capabilities introduce advanced features such as I/O device sharing and partitioning which allows I/O resources to be easily shared among hosts in a secure manner. A congestion control mechanism has also been added to accommodate high performance applications, such as communications networks. The revised specification will be available for download from the InfiniBand Trade Association Web site by the end of October. IBTA DevCon The InfiniBand Trade Association will host its seventh Developers Conference at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco, September 9 from 1:00 to 5:30 p.m. The event includes sessions on the revised specification and the OpenIB Alliance, an effort to create a common Linux stack for InfiniBand implementations. Registration fees are $99 for members and $299 for non members. To register, visit www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaid=71806. Started in August 1999, the InfiniBand Trade Association is made up of leading companies from every segment of the industry. The InfiniBand specifications are available for download from the trade association website: www.infinibandta.org. The InfiniBand Trade Association is comprised of eight special workgroups, each with its own charter and area of expertise. The workgroups include: marketing, technical, applications, compliance and interoperability, electromechanical, link, management and software. The Internet is creating an increased demand for server computer I/O subsystem performance, scalability, reliability and flexibility. A shift to a switched fabric-based I/O architecture will enable industry participants to meet this increased demand. The InfiniBand Trade Association developed a specification for a channel-based, switched fabric architecture that provides a scalable performance range of 2.5Gbps to 120 Gbps, meeting current and future needs from entry level to high-end enterprise systems. InfiniBand I/O is the only open standard available today with remote direct memory access (RMDA). The InfiniBand Trade Association represents the industry's choice for developing I/O technologies that will keep pace with the demands of the Internet age.