Mellanox Technologies Blog

InfiniBand and Ethernet are the leading interconnect solutions for connecting servers and storage systems in high-performance computing and in enterprise (virtualized or not) data centers. Recently, the HPC Advisory Council has put together the most comprehensive database for high-performance computing applications to help users understand the performance, productivity, efficiency and scalability differences between InfiniBand and 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

In summary, there are a large number of HPC applications that need the lowest possible latency for best performance or the highest bandwidth (for example Oil&Gas applications as well as weather related applications). There are some HPC applications that are not latency sensitive. For example, gene sequencing and some bioinformatics applications are not sensitive to latency and scale well with TCP-based networks including GigE and 10GigE. For HPC converged networks, putting HPC message passing traffic and storage traffic on a single TCP network may not provide enough data throughput for either. Finally, there is a number of examples that show 10GigE has limited scalability for HPC applications and InfiniBand proves to be a better performance, price/performance, and power solution than 10GigE.

The complete report can be found under the HPC Advisory Council case studies or by clicking here.

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Today we launched ConnectX®-2 EN 40G converged network adapter card, the world’s first 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapter solution. ConnectX-2 EN 40G enables data centers to maximize the utilization of the latest multi-core processors, achieve unprecedented Ethernet server and storage connectivity, and advance LAN and SAN unification efforts. Mellanox’s 40 Gigabit Ethernet converged network adapter sets the stage for next-generation data centers by enabling high-bandwidth Ethernet fabrics optimized for efficiency while reducing costs, power, and complexity.

Available today, ConnectX-2 EN 40G supports hardware-based I/O virtualization, including Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), and delivers the features needed for a converged network with support for Data Center Bridging (DCB). Mellanox’s 40 Gigabit Ethernet converged network adapter solution simplifies FCoE deployment with T11 Fibre Channel frame encapsulation support and hardware offloads. The single port ConnectX-2 EN 40G adapter comes with one QSFP connector suitable for use with copper or fiber optic cables to provide the highest flexibility to IT managers.

As part of Mellanox’s comprehensive portfolio of 10 Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand adapters, ConnectX-2 EN 40G is supported by a full suite of software drivers for Microsoft Windows, Linux distributions, VMware and Citrix XEN Server. ConnectX-2 EN 40G supports stateless offload and is fully interoperable with standard TCP/UDP/IP stacks.

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VMworld was everything we expected and more. The traffic was tremendous and we had a lot of excitement and buzz in our booth (especially after we won the Best of VMworld in the Cloud Computing category). Just in case you were unable to sit through one of Mellanox’s presentations, or from one of our partners (Xsigo, HP, Intalio, RNA Networks, and OpenFabrics Alliance), we went ahead and video taped the sessions, and have posted them below.

 Mellanox – F.U.E.L. Efficient Virtualized Data Centers

 Mellanox – On-Demand Network Services

 Intalio – Private Cloud Platform

 HP BladeSystem and ExSO SL-Series

 Xsigo – How to Unleash vSphere’s Full Potential with Xsigo Virtual I/O

 RNA Networks – Virtual Memory

 OpenFabrics Alliance – All things Virtual with OpenFabrics and IB

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ISC’09 in Hamburg, Germany, went exceptionally well. Below is a quick video of us launching the new IS5000 family of 40Gb/s InfiniBand switches to the attending press and analysts. Afterwards, Gilad Shainer, director of HPC marketing, gives you a tour on the live booth demonstrations for both 40Gb/s IB and low-latency 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

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Just in case you missed us at Interop 2009, below are just a few of the presentations that took place in our booth.

Mellanox 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 40Gb/s InfiniBand adapters, switches and gateways are key to making your data center F.U.E.L. Efficient

Mellanox Product Manager, Satish Kikkeri, provides additional details on Low-Latency Ethernet

Mellanox Product Manager, TA Ramanujam, provides insight on how data centers can achieve true unified I/O today

Fusion-io’s CTO, David Flynn, presents “Moving Storage to Microsecond Time-Scales”

 

We look forward to seeing you at our next event or tradeshow.

Brian Sparks
brian@mellanox.com

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This week I presented in the LS-DYNA user conference. LS-DYNA is one of the most used applications for automotive related computer simulations – simulations that are being used throughout the vehicle design process and decreases the need to build expensive physical prototypes. Computer simulation usage has decreased the vehicle design cycle from years to month, and is responsible for cost reduction throughout the process. Almost every part in the vehicle is designed with computer aided simulations. From crash/safety simulation to engine and gasoline flow, from air condition to water pumps, almost every part of the vehicle is simulated.

Today challenges in vehicle simulations are around the motivation to build more economical and ecological designs, how to do design lighter vehicles (less material to be used) while meeting the increased safety regulation demands. For example, national and international standardizations have been put in place, which provide structural crashworthiness requirements for railway vehicle bodies.

In order to be able to meet all of those requirements and demands, higher compute simulation capability is required. It is not a surprise that LS-DYNA is being mostly used in high-performance clustering environments as they provide the needed flexibility, scalability and efficiency for such simulations. Increasing high-performance clustering productivity and the capability to handle more complex simulations is the most important factor for the automotive makers today. It requires using balanced clustering design (hardware – CPU, memory, interconnect, GPU; and software), enhanced messaging techniques and the knowledge on how to increase the productivity from a given design.

For LS-DYNA, InfiniBand interconnect-based solutions have been proven to provide the highest productivity compared to Ethernet (GigE, 10GigE, iWARP). With InfiniBand, LS-DYNA demonstrated high parallelism and scalability, which enabled it to take full advantage of multi-core high-performance computing clusters. In the case of Ethernet, the better choice between GigE, 10GigE and iWARP is 10GigE. While iWARP aim to provide better performance, typical high-performance applications are using send-receive semantics which iWARP does not provide any added value with, and even worse, it just increase the complexity and the CPU overhead/power consumption.

If you want to get a copy of a paper that present the capabilities to increase simulations productivity while decrease power consumption, don’t hesitate to send me a note (hpc@mellanox.com).

Gilad Shainer
shainer@mellanox.com

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I/O virtualization is a complimentary solution for server and storage virtualization, which aims to reduce the management complexity of physical connections in and out of virtual hosts. Virtualized data center clusters will have multiple networking connections to LAN and SAN, and virtualizing the network avoids the extra complexity associated with it. While I/O virtualization reduces the management complexity, in order to maintain high productivity and scalability one should pay attention to other characteristics of the network being virtualized.

Offloading the network virtualization from the VMM (virtual machine manager, e.g. Hypervisor) to a smart networking adapter, not only reduces the CPU overhead associated with the virtualization management, but also increases the performance capability of the virtual machines (or guest OSs) and can provide the native performance capabilities to them.

The PCISIG has standards in place to help simplify I/O virtualization. The most interesting solution is Single Root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV). SR-IOV allows a smart adapter to create multiple virtual adapters (virtual functions) for a given physical server. The virtual adapters can be assigned directly to a virtual machine (VM) instead of relying on the VMM to manage everything.

SR-IOV provides a standard mechanism for devices to advertise their ability to be simultaneously shared among multiple virtual machines. SR-IOV allows the partitioning of PCI functions into many virtual interfaces for the purpose of sharing the resources of a PCI device in a virtual environment.

Mellanox interconnect solutions provide full SR-IOV support while adding the required scalability and high throughput capabilities to effectively support multiple virtual machines on a single physical server. With Mellanox 10GigE or 40Gb/s InfiniBand solutions, each of the virtual machines can get the needed bandwidth allocation to ensure highest productivity and performance, just as if it was a physical server. 

Gilad Shainer
Director of Technical Marketing
gilad@mellanox.com

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Last week I was at Storage Networking World in Orlando, Florida.  The sessions were a lot better organized with focus on all the popular topics like Cloud Computing, Storage Virtualization and Solid State Storage (SSD).  In our booth, we demonstrated our Layer 2 agnostic storage supporting iSCSI, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and SRP (SCSI RDMA Protocol) all coexisting in a single network. We partnered with Rorke Data who demonstrated a 40Gb/s InfiniBand-based storage array and Texas Memory System’s ‘World’s Fastest Storage’ in our booth demonstrating sustained rates of 3Gb/s and over 400K I/Os using Solid State Drives. 

I attended few of the sessions on the SSD and Cloud Computing stream. SSD was my favorite topic primarily because InfiniBand and SSD together will provide the highest storage performance and has the potential to carve out a niche in the data center OLTP applications market. Clod Barrera, IBM’s Chief Technical Storage Strategist’s presentation on SSD was very good. He had a chart which talked about how HDD I/O rates per GByte had dropped so low and currently staying constant at around 150 to 200 I/Os per drive. On the contrary SSD’s have capability to produce 50K I/Os on Read and 17K I/Os on Write.  Significant synergy can be achieved by combining SSD with InfiniBand technology. InfiniBand delivers the lowest latency of sub 1us and the highest bandwidth of 40Gb/s.  The combination of these technologies will provide significant value in the datacenter and has the potential to change the database and OLTP storage infrastructure.

SSD over InfiniBand delivers:

-  Ultra-fast, lowest latency infrastructure for transaction processing applications

-  Delivering a more compelling Green per GB 

-   Faster recovery time for business continuity applications

-   Disruptive scaling

I see lot of opportunity for InfiniBand technology in the storage infrastructure as SSD provides the much needed discontinuity to the rotary media. 

TA Ramanujam (TAR)
tar@mellanox.com

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It took me a while but I’m back – hope you’re all been waiting to hear from me .

With that, I’ve decided to go into un-charted territories…HADOOP

Hadoop is an Apache project. It is a framework, written in Java, for running applications on large clusters built with commodity hardware (distributed computing). Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or re-executed on any node in the cluster.

Hadoop provides a distributed file system (HDFS) that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. The 2 key functions in Hadoop are map and reduce. I would like to briefly touch on what they mean.

The map function processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, while the reduce function merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key. A map-reduce job usually splits the input data-set into independent chunks which are processed by the map tasks in a completely parallel manner, the framework sorts the outputs of the maps, which then input to the reduce tasks. Typically both the input and the output of the job are stored in a file-system Master/Slave architecture.

The  test we’ve conducted was the DFSIO benchmark, a map-reduce job where each map task opens a file and writes/reads to/from it, closes it, and measures the I/I time. There is only single reduce task which aggregates individual times and sizes. We’ve limited the test for 10 to 50 files measurements with 360 MB that we found reasonable compared with the ratio of number of nodes used and number of files. We then compared that to a public publish from Yahoo  which used 14k files over 4k nodes. This boils down to 3.5 files per node where we are using 50 files over 12 nodes, which equates to over 4 files per node.

Given the above configuration and the test described above, here is a snap shot of the results we’ve seen:

It can clearly be seen from the above, as well as through other results we’ve been given, that InfiniBand and 10GigE (via our ConnectX adapters) is half the time in execution time and over triple in bandwidth…these are very conclusive results by any matrix. 

A very interesting point to review is that the tests which were executed using DFS located on a hard disk showed significant better performance, but when testing with RamDisk, the gap increased even more. e.g. latency became from half to one-third… it seems like a clear way to unleash the potential.

In my next blog post I’ll plan to either review a new application or anther aspect of this application.

Nimrod Gindi

Director of Corporate Strategy

nimrodg@mellanox.com

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Today’s data center requires a low-cost, low-power I/O solution with network flexibility to provide I/O consolidation on a single adapter. Network administrators want the best performance, scalability, latency while solving all their LAN, SAN and IPC (Clustering) needs packed into one adapter card in a virtualized or data center environment.

ConnectX® is a single chip solution from Mellanox that provides these features for the Data Center I/O unification with its hardware and software capabilities.  ConnectX® EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet drivers provide seamless connectivity by providing optimized 10 Gigabit Ethernet I/O services that easily scale with multi-core CPUs and virtualized servers and storage architectures.

Mellanox entry into the 10GigE landscape was rather late if you consider 10GigE started showing up in 2001 on servers as PCI-X followed by PCIe adapters. With Mellanox’s extensive experience in high-performance computing and broad range of industry relationships, it has forged ahead with this technology and was the first company to offer 10GigE with PCIe 2.0. Along the way, our products have matured to become the market-leader for performance, latency, as well as consolidating all data center networking onto a single adapter.

In a span of less than 2 years, Mellanox has introduced a broad range of products supporting various media interconnects and cabling options including UTP, CX4 for copper and SR, LR and LRM for fiber optics.

Technology leadership in networking requires that a company not only have the best hardware solution, but compliment this with the best software solution to make a winning combination.

In my experience, working at other early startups, as well as network technology bellwether 10Gigabit Ethernet companies, the Gen1/Gen2 10GigE products introduced lacked the vision of what the end-customer requirements were. The products were a “mish-mosh” of features addressing 10GigE for LAN, clustering (iWARP), TCP acceleration (aka TOE) and iSCSI acceleration. They missed the mark by not solving the pain-points of a data center, be it blazing performance, low-latency, CPU utilization or true I/O consolidation.

Mellanox took the holistic approach to data center networking with a deep understanding from its InfiniBand leadership and knowledgebase, server and system configuration, virtualization requirements and benefits, driver software requirements, and most importantly, understanding customer requirements for each vertical segment.

Today, ConnectX® EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet drivers support a broad array of major operating systems, including Windows, Linux, VMware Infrastructure, Citrix XenServer and FreeBSD.

The ConnectX® EN 10 Gigabit Ethernet drivers provide:

- All Stateless offload features
- Virtualized accelerations
- Data Center Ethernet (DCE) support
- FCoE with full hardware offload for SAN consolidation on 10GigE
- Lowest 10GigE (TCP/IP) latency comparable to expensive iWARP solutions
- Single Root – IO Virtualization (SR-IOV) for superior virtualization performance
- Linux Kernel and Linux Distribution support
- WHQL certified drivers for Windows Server 2003 and 2008
- VMware Ready certification for VMware Virtual Infrastructure (ESX 3.5)
- XenServer 4.1 inbox support
- Line-rate performance with very low CPU utilization
- Replace multiple GigE NICs with a single ConnectX Ethernet adapter

To complete the last piece of the puzzle, i.e. IPC (clustering) for the Data Center, I’ll soon post in my blog on Industry’s Low Latency Ethernet (LLE) initiative and its advantages compared to current available clustering solutions on 10GigE.

Regards,
Satish Kikkeri
satish@mellanox.com

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