… New Architecture Spec by InfiniBand Trade Association …

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), an organization dedicated to maintaining and furthering the IB specification, announced Release 1.3 of Volume 2 of the InfiniBand Architecture Specification.

The new specification is aligned with IBTA’s roadmap, providing a low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect solution which provides low processing overhead to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection. The latest release introduces improved data transfer speeds of 56 and 168 Gb/s and enhances interoperability between devices and cables.

"Interoperability is increasingly important for IB vendors and customers as the technology continues to deliver higher interconnect speeds and greater application performance," said Bill Magro, director, Technical Computing Software Solutions at Intel Corp. and co-chair of the IBTA Technical Working Group. "IBTA’s new InfiniBand Architecture Specification delivers substantial performance gains while preserving device, switch and cable interoperability."

InfiniBand Release 1.3 improves testing methods for Quad Data Rate (QDR) and Fourteen Data Rate (FDR) speeds and lays the groundwork for Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) to emerge in 2013-2014.

In addition to providing improved speed for faster data transfer and higher performance, the new specification also promotes increased efficiency and robustness. Systems compliant with the new specification are more power efficient than those on previous generations, sending more data with less power. Data communication is reliable and robust, with support for actively managed passive and active copper and optical cables.

"IB continues to provide the best price/performance and greatest ROI over other computing fabrics," said Mike Matchett, senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group. "With the majority of the world’s fastest compute systems currently utilizing IB, this new specification will play an important role in advancing computing capabilities at the high end and into the enterprise data center."

The InfiniBand Architecture Specification Volume 2 defines the physical, electrical, and link characteristics of InfiniBand.

IB, supporting speeds from SDR 10Gb/s to FDR 56Gb/s, is used in thousands of data centers, HPC clusters and embedded environments. Through the availability of long-haul IB over WAN technologies, it is able to efficiently move large data between remote data centers around the globe. Real world applications show improvement utilizing IB versus other network technologies and this performance scales from small compute and storage clusters to 10s of thousands of nodes.

More than 75 representatives from over two dozen technology companies within the IBTA Electro-Mechanical Working Group (EWG) contributed to the new specification and more than 25 hardware vendors have built cables for the new specification.

To view full specification (registration needed)