HPCwire: Mellanox Demos 20 Gb/s InfiniBand with NFS-RDMA

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November 03, 2006

Mellanox Demos 20 Gb/s InfiniBand with NFS-RDMA

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd., a supplier of semiconductor-based, high performance interconnect products, has demostrated that 20 Gb/s InfiniBand with NFS-RDMA open-source solutions delivers over ten times the maximum theoretical performance of NFS file systems using a Gigabit Ethernet connection. Mellanox showed this performance with client machines interconnected with 20 Gb/s InfiniBand to the new Mellanox MTD2000 NFS-RDMA Server Product Development Kit (PDK) featuring a RAID-5 back-end storage subsystem with SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard disk drives.

"Mellanox 20 Gb/s InfiniBand and remote direct memory access (RDMA) opens up the performance bottleneck of networked file system I/O for applications such as high-performance computing, EDA, financial, backup, disaster recovery, and clustered database solutions," said Sujal Das, director of software product management for Mellanox Technologies. "We believe the MTD2000 PDK will reduce development costs, accelerate time to market and enable OEMs to provide cost-effective NFS-RDMA storage systems based on software available from the open source community."

With two NFS-RDMA clients interconnect to the MTD2000 through 20 Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect and reading from the file server cache, 1400 MB/s of throughput was measured using the IOZone file system benchmark. When actual write performance to disk was measured, nearly 400 MB/s of throughput was demonstrated with RAID-5, which can be increased by cascading additional SAS hard disks. This measured performance exceeds the maximum theoretical performance over a Gigabit Ethernet link of 125 MB/s which is commonly used for networked file storage connectivity today.

The PDK includes the MTD2000 Filer Unit, the MTD2000E Extender Storage Chassis (optional) for higher read/write disk I/O performance, associated documentation, and a comprehensive software development kit (SDK).

The MTD2000 Filer Unit is a 3U, 16-drive, 576 GB high performance storage unit based on industry-standard components including a dual-core Intel Woodcrest-based motherboard, Mellanox InfiniBand 20Gb/s HCA adapter card, LSI Logic MegaRAID SAS 8480E adapter, and SAS disk drives. The MTD2000E Extender Storage Chassis and SAS cascading cable can be used to increase the number of disk drives up to 126. The SDK includes open-source NFS-RDMA server and client implementations, and RPMs tested and hardened for the MTD2000 platform. It also includes a user guide, benchmark charts, QA test report, and optional software support terms and options.

The NFS-RDMA client software is interoperable and supported with OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.1 and supports major Linux operating system distributions. The NFS-RDMA server software, which is ready for installation on the MTD2000, is supported on Novell SLES 10 and is compatible and interoperable with OFED 1.1.

The Mellanox MTD2000 and MTD2000E components of the PDK are available today and can be used with open source NFS-RDMA software. The SDK and associated support is scheduled to be available in December 2006.

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