Double Data Rate Technology

Mellanox’s InfiniBand DDR Family of Products delivers I/O performance of 20Gb/s and 60Gb/s connections over a single cable. InfiniBand DDR extends its price/performance leadership with world-class bandwidth and latency performance. Best of all, InfiniBand DDR is completely hardware and software backward compatible to existing 10Gb/s and 30Gb/s deployments enabling worry-free migration.

Performance

InfiniBand DDR delivers world-class bandwidth and latency performance. On standard Ohio State University MPI benchmarks, InfiniBand DDR offers over a 50% throughput advantage over InfiniBand SDR along with an 18% reduction in MPI latency.

Applications

InfiniBand DDR products answer to data center and compute cluster demands for an interconnect solution that offers maximum price/performance while also properly scaling with increasing computing and storage bandwidth requirements. The following is a partial list of applications that demand InfiniBand DDR:

• Virtualized Data Center
  
• High-throughput Data Warehouses
  
• Parallel Queries to Clustered Databases
  
• Backup, Restore, Mirroring
  
• HPC (Fluent, LS-Dyna, PAM-Crash, etc.)
  
• HDTV/Video-on-Demand
  
• Graphics, Video Editing
  
• Electronic Design Automation
  
• Communications and Data Acquisition

In addition, InfiniBand DDR technology properly balances the power of today’s multi-processor servers with the highest throughput I/O solution, enabling maximum utilization of compute resources. With built in remote direct memory access (RDMA) and hardware transport in the HCA, InfiniBand DDR ensures the CPU is focused on application processing rather than network transport functions, significantly boosting overall performance.

InfiniBand DDR also enables the unification of computing and storage clusters on the same fabric. This offers scalability, direct 20Gb/s bandwidth to each node, and the benefits of simplified management and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) by only managing a single fabric.

As clusters grow to multi-thousand nodes and beyond, InfiniBand DDR offers significant cable management advantages by providing up to 60Gb/s of bandwidth from switch to switch. In a 1024 node cluster where the end points remain at 10Gb/s, 60Gb/s switch-to-switch bandwidth can reduce the total number of cables required to assemble the cluster by over 40%.

Software Support

InfiniBand DDR is completely software compatible with existing drivers and upper layer protocol stacks deployed in the market today at 10Gb/s and 30Gb/s. Mellanox offers InfiniBand Gold which is an easy-to-install, turnkey software package for both server and storage clusters based on open source Linux software.

Additional Linux and Windows support is offered by the OpenIB.org Alliance. The wide InfiniBand software ecosystem provides support for virtually every operating system including Microsoft Windows, AIX, HPUX, Solaris, OS-X and WindRiver VxWorks.