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What is Infiniband? What I have found is its a fabric switch network medium used for high performance computing.

But more specificly what is it? Is it networking medium in the same way as cat5e is to ethernet? or is it more like Fiber Channel where it is used to connect systems to a storage backend?

Can some give me a bit more detail?

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closed as off topic by Ward, kce, Sven, Tom O'Connor, MDMarra Jan 14 '12 at 11:24


You do't really feel being ocompetent in using the internet, right? -1. Homework level question. –  TomTom Jan 14 '12 at 5:43

1 Answer 1

Check out the Wikipedia article for a lot more detail. InfiniBand is something like a cross between a device interconnect standard like PCI and a networking technology like Ethernet, but with a higher-level command set ("verbs") than just unicast and multicast data packets. It's meant to connect compute resources in a very high speed, very low latency, and very scalable manner. It's not something you're just going to bolt into commercial off-the-shelf software, though. If you need the high performance it offers (and can stomach the high cost) in your application you'll probably be working with custom code. It could be used to replace virtually any interconnect method (fibre channel, PCI, Ethernet, etc) but has only really caught-on in high performance computing applications (probably because it's more expensive and less common, as well as being overkill in a lot of applications).

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Actually it is cheaper than 10G - but can not handle large bandwidths. It is used in Virtualization to sync memory etc. Basically modern Infiniband is... 4xPCI-E between computers. 450 nanoseconds guaranteed latency. –  TomTom Jan 14 '12 at 5:44
"but can not handle large bandwidths" was this a miss print, Also its the cheapest hi perf interconnect that you'll probably ever see. Check out mellanox's stuff. –  tony roth Jan 22 '12 at 23:07
