1. InfiniBand By Group 3: Casey Bauer Mary Daniel William Hunter Hannah McMahon John Walls

2. What is InfiniBand?  InfiniBand ia a developing internet technology that has the ability to solve limitation problem that come with today’s I/O subsystems.

3. Creators of Infinband  The InfiniBand Trade Association was formed in 1999, by seven industry leaders:  Compaq  Dell  Hewlett-Packard  IBM  Intel  Microsoft  Sun Microsystems  Intel is currently working on its own type of InfiniBand technology through their interoperability labs.

4. Reason for InfiniBand  The goal of the seven members of the ITA was to design an I/O subsystem to replace the limited sever machines of the shared bus architecture.

5. What does it do?  InfiniBand defines much higher link bandwidths than available using the shared bus architecture.

6. How does it work?  In its simplest configuration, two or more host devices, nodes, are connected through the fabric by channel adaptors.

7. More on how InfiniBand works  The channel adaptors may be either Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) or Target Channel Adapters (TCAs).  A switch uses Local IDs (LIDs) to transfer packets from one source to the receiver.  Routers use globally unique identifiers (GIDs) to transfer packets across domains.  Routers are used to form “larger multi-domain system area networks” by interconnecting two or more subnets.  When each node, switch, and router are connected, it forms a point-to-point serial connection.  Uses only four connections versus the wide parallel connection of the PCI bus.

8. What does this mean?  Less work is put on the bus and delays due to heavy loading conditions are a thing of the past.  Much higher bandwidths are reached.  Shorter connections between hosts and I/O devices within InfiniBand Data Center.

9. How InfiniBand Compares  The best internet technology has the transfer speed of around 500 megabytes per second.  InfiniBand technology has the expectations of 6 gigabytes per second.

10. What are the benefits  Can provide round the clock availability of data through its routine system.  Enable data to be transferred at a much faster rate.  Available storage can be partitioned around many servers to benefit security and management tasks.  Low cost.

11. Questions?