Cable of Infiniband
InfiniBand is a high-speed serial computer bus designed for both internal and external connections. It is the result of a fusion of two competing designs, Future I / O, developed by Compaq, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and Next Generation I / O (ngio), developed by Intel, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. On the side of Compaq, the origination history was in Tandems ServerNet. This technique was known as System I / O for a short time until the final name was adopted.
InfiniBand uses a bidirectional serial bus to keep costs and delay low. Nevertheless, it is very fast, 10 Gbit / s in both directions. InfiniBand uses a switched topology so that different devices can use the network simultaneously (as opposed to bus topology). Data is sent in bundles that are joined together to form a message. Such a message may be a direct memory read access or write operation from or to another node (Remote DMA or RDMA), a broadcast or receive packet, transaction-based operation or multicast transmission.
Just like the channel-based model in mainframes, all transmissions start or end with a channel adapter. Each processor has a Host Channel Adapter (HCA) and each peripheral has a Target Channel Adapter (TCA). These adapters can also exchange information for security or quality of service (QoS).
InfiniBand's primary goal seems to link CPUs and their high-speed devices into a cluster for back-office applications. In this role, it will replace the PCI, Fiber Channel and various other connectors such as Ethernet. Eventually, all CPUs and peripherals would be connected in one Infiniband network. This has a number of advantages in addition to higher speed including the fact that normally "hidden" devices such as PCI cards can be accessed by any device in the network. Theoretically, this should make computer clusters easier and even cheaper because more devices can be shared.
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