Oak Ridge officials wanted to test how well long-distance InfiniBand connections could work in comparison to some specialized forms of TCP/IP over 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Using InfiniBand, researchers were able to achieve an average throughput of 7.34 gigabits/sec between two machines at each end of the 8,600-mile optical link. In contrast, the throughout of such traffic using a tweaked high-throughput version of TCP, called Hyper Text Caching Protocol (HTCP), was 1.79 gigabits/sec at best.
Infiniband Goes the Distance
December 23, 2008