Mellanox IB Adapters Compatible With Nvidia GPUDirect RDMA

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA technology, which is supported on NVIDIA Tesla K40 and K20 series GPU accelerators, is supported on the company’s Connect-IB IB adapters.

The combined solution provides application performance for GPU-accelerator based high-performance clusters.

With support based on the message passing interface MVAPICH2-2.0b release by The Ohio State University, the following features and capabilities are enabled:

• Multi-rail capabilities for NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA with MVAPICH2

• 67% reduction in small message latency and a 10% reduction in large message latency

• 5X bandwidth improvement for small messages with Connect-IB

• Support for RDMA over IB and Ethernet (RoCE)

“Using enhanced MVAPICH2-2.0b with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA-based designs, end-users will now see a significant reduction in latency for small messages and an increase in bandwidth for large messages,” said Professor Dhableswar K. Panda of The Ohio State University. “The MVAPICH2-2.0b design with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA support is able to deliver excellent performance for K40 GPUs using Connect-IB FDR adapters.”

“We see increased adoption of FDR IB and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA technology by leading commercial partners, government agencies, as well as academia and research institutions,” said Gilad Shainer, VP marketing, Mellanox. “Mellanox’s FDR IB solutions with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA are providing the highest level of application performance, scalability and efficiency for GPU-based clusters.”

“With 12GB of ultra-fast GDDR5 memory and support for PCIe Gen 3 interconnect technology, the new Tesla K40 accelerators are ideal for ultra-large scale scientific and commercial workloads,” said Ian Buck, VP of accelerated computing, NVIDIA Corporation. “When coupled with NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA technology, Mellanox IB solutions unlock new levels of performance for HPC customers by enabling direct memory access from the GPU across the IB fabric.”

Beta-level support for NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA and MVAPICH2-2.0b-GDR will be publically available this quarter with the upcoming MLNX_OFED 2.1 release.