In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Hoot Thompson from NASA Center for Climate Simulation presents: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud.
So what is SR-IOV? The short answer is that SR-IOV is a specification that allows a PCIe device to appear to be multiple separate physical PCIe devices. The SR-IOV specification was created and is maintained by the PCI SIG, with the idea that a standard specification will help promote interoperability.