General |
| Q1. |
What are the key benefits of InfiniBand option for BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A1. |
InfiniBand option provides a high performance interconnect option for scale-out cluster solutions:
- high bandwidth (up to 40 gigabits per second signaling rate in each direction)
- low latency (as low as 1.2 microseconds MPI ping-pong)
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| Q2. |
What options are available for InfiniBand products for BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A2. |
4X QDR and DDR InfiniBand product options are available.
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| Q3. |
How many ports are available on the InfiniBand HCA, and how many ports are on the switch module? |
| A3. |
All InfiniBand 4X QDR mezzanine HCAs are dual-port cards. Depending on the server blade models, some configuration rules may apply which may result in only one port being connected to the enclosure mid-plane. Please refer to server blades specification for more details.
InfiniBand blade switches for c-Class are double-wide and have 16 downlink ports to connect up to 16 server blades, and 16 QSFP uplink ports for inter-switch links.
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| Q4. |
What performance is expected using the InfiniBand option on the HP BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A4. |
4X QDR InfiniBand is capable of supporting up to 40Gbps per port, 4X DDR InfiniBand is capable for supporting up to 20Gbps per port. |
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| System support |
| Q1. |
What server blades are supported? |
| A1. |
QDR InfiniBand is supported on G6 blades with Intel® Xeon® processors, and DDR InfiniBand is supported on G1 and G5 blades (see Quickspecs for the list of server blades). |
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| Q2. |
What server operating systems are supported by the mezzanine HCA? |
| A2. |
RedHat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux and Microsoft Windows HPC server 2008 are supported.
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| Q3. |
How are InfiniBand Subnet Manager services provided? |
| A3. |
The subnet manager functionality can be provided by either a rack-mount InfiniBand switch with an embedded fabric manager (also known as internally managed switch) or host-based subnet manager software on a server, or a management module for the QLogic switch blade . |