InfiniBand Roadmap Foretells a World Where Server Connectivity is at 1000 Gb/sec

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The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) has updated their InfiniBand Roadmap. With HDR 200 Gb/sec technologies shipping this year, the roadmap looks out to an XDR world where server connectivity reaches 1000 Gb/sec.

The IBTA‘s InfiniBand roadmap is continuously developed as a collaborative effort from the various IBTA working groups. Members of the IBTA working groups include leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of InfiniBand. The roadmap details 1x, 4x, and 12x port widths with bandwidths reaching 600Gb/s data rate HDR in 2017. The roadmap is intended to keep the rate of Infiniband performance increase in line with systems-level performance gains.

For those with a stake in the interconnect business, the roadmap provides a vendor-neutral outline for the progression of InfiniBand so that they may plan their product development accordingly. For enterprise and high-performance computing end users, the roadmap provides specific milestones around expected improvements to ensure their InfiniBand investment is protected.”

Founded in 1999, the IBTA is chartered with maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand Architecture specification defining hardware transport protocols sufficient to support both reliable messaging (send/receive) and memory manipulation semantics (e.g. remote DMA) without software intervention in the data movement path. These transport protocols are defined to run over Ethernet (RoCE) as well as InfiniBand fabrics.  The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes Broadcom, Cray Inc., HPE, IBM, Intel, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, Oracle and QLogic. IBTA members represent leading enterprise IT vendors that are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification.

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