Practically every HPC network has its own lower-level programming interface. Myrinet has both MX (Myrinet Express) and GM (Glenn’s Messages). QsNet has Elan and the associated Tports. SCI has SISCI (Software Infrastructure for SCI). VIA has VIPL (VI Provider Library). InfiniBand and iWARP do not have standard interfaces, but the Open Group has defined the […]
Archives for March 2006
What other HPC networks exist?
March 5, 2006 by
The VIA-inspired networks may get all the attention, but they aren’t the only ones available. Myrinet, from Myricom, is second in popularity only to Ethernet. It has been around for a long time and has a lot of community support. It is also quite cheap, by HPC standards. Then there is the SCI (Scalable Coherent […]
What is iWARP?
March 4, 2006 by
The Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol (iWARP) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) update of the RDMA Consortium’s RDMA over TCP standard. This later standard is zero-copy transmission over legacy TCP. Because a kernel implementation of the TCP stack is a tremendous bottleneck, a few vendors now implement TCP in hardware. As simple data […]
What is InfiniBand?
March 2, 2006 by
The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is a superset of the Virtual Interface Architecture. It was originally devised to connect everything within a computing system and thus replace Ethernet, Fibre Channel, PCI, etc. While its no-legacy goal has not panned out, InfiniBand has gained ground within the high-end interconnect market. Essentially, it is a standard that specifies […]
What is the Virtual Interface Architecture?
March 2, 2006 by
The VIA is an abstract model of a user-level zero-copy network, and is the basis for InfiniBand and iWARP. Networks are a shared resource. In traditional networks such as Ethernet, the network is protected by the kernel, which presents a tremendous performance bottleneck when latency is an issue. One of the classic developments in computing […]
What is HPC Answers?
March 1, 2006 by
HPC Answers is dedicated to answering questions about high-performance computing. Topics range from technical issues to enterprise applications, from the latest hardware to the most fashionable software, from networks and storage to processors and memory. In short, any HPC-related topic is fair here. Anyone may submit his own questions or answer existing ones. This site […]
