General |
| Q1. |
What are the key benefits of 4X DDR InfiniBand option for BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A1. |
4X DDR InfiniBand option provides a high performance interconnect option for scale-out cluster solutions:
- high bandwidth (20 gigabits per second signaling rate in each direction)
- low latency (as low as 1.3 microseconds MPI ping-pong)
- low power consumption (< 5 Watts per single-port mezzanine HCA) interconnect
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| Q2. |
What options are available for 4X DDR InfiniBand products for BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A2. |
4X DDR InfiniBand products offer two mezzanine card options and a switch module (double wide), with the choice of Voltaire or Cisco InfiniBand driver software and fabric management options.
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| Q3. |
How many ports are available on the InfiniBand HCA, and how many ports are on the switch module? |
| A3. |
The HP 4X DDR IB Dual-port Mezzanine HCA is a dual-port card and the HP 4X DDR IB Mezzanine HCA is a single port HCA. It is plugged on a PCI-Express connector on the server blade. The HP 4X DDR IB switch module is built on a 24-port single switch chip. It provides 16 downlinks to connect up to 16 server blades, and 8 uplinks to connect other InfiniBand switches. Dual switch modules connect server blades with 16 uplinks.
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| Q4. |
What performance is expected using the InfiniBand option on the HP BladeSystem c-Class? |
| A4. |
The InfiniBand option the HP BladeSystem c-Class is based on 4 X Double Data Rate (DDR) InfiniBand technologies. The mezzanine HCA and switch module are running at 20 Gigabit per second signaling rate (16 Gigabit per second data rate) in each direction. The MPI ping-pong latency is expected to be around 1.3 microseconds on the dual-port mezzanine HCA and around 3 to 4 microseconds on the single-port mezzanine HCA. . The actual performance will depend on the specific configuration.
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| System support |
| Q1. |
What server blades are supported? |
| A1. |
All HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades are supported. It is recommended to use the dual-port mezzanine HCA when the quad-core processors are configured on the server blades.
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| Q2. |
What server operating systems are supported by the mezzanine HCA? |
| A2. |
RedHat and SuSE Linux distributions are supported. Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server is supported on Voltaire GridStack for the single-port mezzanine HCA.
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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. HP supports Voltaire Grid Switch family products with embedded fabric manager, Cisco SFS 7000D 24-port switch with embedded subnet manager, and host-based subnet managers the Voltaire GridVision BladeFM and the Cisco High Performance Subnet Manager (HSM) for the subnet management service. The Voltaire GridVision BladeFM and the Cisco High-Performance Subnet Manager run on Linux servers.
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