HPCwire: InfiniBand and 10GbE Head for Showdown

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December 21, 2007

InfiniBand and 10GbE Head for Showdown

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

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Will 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) reach critical mass in the datacenter next year? The beginnings of a viable 10GbE ecosystem are now emerging and a number of analysts think 2008 may be a watershed year for this technology. Dell'Oro Group reports nearly a million 10GbE switch ports were shipped in 2007 and predicts 100 percent growth over the next two years. The Linley Group estimated 50 thousand 10GbE NICs were shipped in 2007 (twice as many as the previous year); however, 99 percent went into midrange Unix servers rather than x86-based systems. Although some formidable challenges remain, the industry may finally be ready to make the shift from Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) to 10GbE.

The key battleground for interconnect dominance will take place where high performance connectivity is in most demand: high end technical computing (science research, oil & gas, financial services, life sciences, digital animation, etc.) and high performance enterprise computing (Web 2.0, video editing & production, IPTV, real-time database applications, etc.). These types of applications have a critical need for more bandwidth and/or lower latency. With computing power being concentrated by multicore processors, blade servers and virtualization, server-to-server and server-to-storage communication has become a critical bottleneck.

While Fibre Channel is confined to storage networks, both InfiniBand and Ethernet have the ability to connect both storage and compute servers. Although InfiniBand is well established at the high end of HPC, the vast mid-market is still up for grabs, and will quickly respond to the best price/performance solution. The 10GbE switch and NIC vendors are counting on the ubiquity of Ethernet to make it a no-brainer as a unified server and storage fabric for the datacenter.

Analysts like Linley Group's Bob Wheeler would support that contention. In a report about the benefits and challenges of 10GbE, Wheeler writes: "[T]the adoption of 10GbE is a certainty. The only questions are how quickly 10GbE will be adopted and to what extent it will displace alternative technologies such as Fibre Channel and InfiniBand." In truth, adoption is long overdue; the aforementioned Linley report was written in January 2005.

InfiniBand vendors believe that the technical superiority and attractive price/performance of their technology have paved the way to the HPC mid-market as well as to the broader enterprise computing market, where highly dense and highly utilized hardware is creating the same demands on the interconnect as it has in traditional HPC. Over the past couple of years, InfiniBand has established itself as the de facto standard for high performance interconnects. More than half (58 percent) of the 100 fastest supercomputers now use InfiniBand, according the latest TOP500 list. Although the list is still dominated by Gigabit Ethernet overall, InfiniBand penetration has been doubling every year since 2005. (For one man's view of the significance of InfiniBand's rise in the TOP500, read Gilad Shainer's article in this issue.)

By moving from Single Data Rate (10 Gbps) to Double Data Rate (20 Gbps) in 2007, InfiniBand has opened up a performance gap that 10GbE will be hard-pressed to fill. With Quad Data Rate InfiniBand (40 Gbps) products on the horizon, 10GbE will have to compete on something other than raw performance.

The big selling points for 10GbE are its position as the heir apparent of GigE and its ability to act as a unifying fabric for NAS, SANs, LANs, and cluster computing systems in the datacenter. NIC vendors like NetEffect, NetXen, and Chelsio Communications are offering 10GbE adapters with built-in support for RDMA (iWARP) to lighten the load on the CPU and achieve InfiniBand-like latency. Chelsio has been pushing its "unified wire" strategy based on its new 10GbE Terminator 3 ASIC. The chip has the ability to handle NIC, TOE, iSCSI and RDMA applications concurrently.

Up until this point, the 10GbE NICs and switches have been too expensive to be widely deployed in clustered systems. But with sub-$1000, RDMA-capable NICs starting to appear from vendors like Chelsio and $400-per-port switches from Arastra, that equation is changing. Arastra is using Fulcrum's latest 10GbE switch silicon, which was designed to enable compute and storage clustering via Ethernet connectivity.

According to Chelsio CEO and President Kianoosh Naghshineh, once 10GbE NICs that support storage and server connectivity become standard on server motherboards, users will be faced with the decision to purchase additional InfiniBand and Fibre Channel HBA/HCAs, switches and gateways for clustering applications or to just use the omnipresence Ethernet NIC. He predicts 10GbE will have "an identical or better cost structure with InfiniBand by the end of next year [2008]."

This year, Woven Systems, a startup switch vendor, set the stage for datacenter Ethernet when it released the EFX 1000, a 10GbE switch that performs active congestion management for lossless Ethernet. In tests at Sandia National Laboratories, researchers determined that the Woven switch actually outperformed an SDR InfiniBand setup when running a CBench performance test. The lab recently deployed the Woven switch for its 128-node "Talon" cluster.

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