Chelsio Looks to Close Ethernet-InfiniBand Gap

By Michael Feldman

January 24, 2013

This week Chelsio Communications unveiled its latest Ethernet adapter ASIC, which brings 40 gigabit speeds to its RDMA over TCP/IP (iWARP) portfolio. The fifth-generation silicon, dubbed Terminator T5, brings bandwidth and latency within spitting distance of FDR InfiniBand, and according to Chelsio, will actually outperform its IB competition on real-world HPC codes. According to Chelsio CEO and president Kianoosh Naghshineh, “the gap is essentially closed.”

Chelsio T5 ASIC sales are expected to ramp starting in Q2, while adapters based on the new silicon will roll out sometime later in the year. No pricing was given.

The T5, like its T4 predecessor, incorporates a TCP Offload Engine (TOE), iSCSI support, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Network Address Translation (NAT) into hardware. But it’s the iWARP capability that is of special interest to HPC. While officially known as Internet Wide Area RDMA Protocol, iWARP is essentially RDMA over Ethernet, built on top of the ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol.

Chelsio T5 ASIC Architecture

And like all RDMA-based technology (which includes HPC’s go-to interconnect, InfiniBand), iWARP has the ability to bypass the CPU for data copies that tend to bottleneck the system. Done right, iWARP can offer performance on par with that of InfiniBand, and is eminently suitable for HPC clustering. And since it’s running atop TCP, iWARP is general-purpose enough to work in much larger and more heterogenous networks.

Better yet, since it’s supported by the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED), Linux applications written for InfiniBand can run seamlessly on iWARP-compatible gear. There’s no need to write codes specific to the protocol. The OpenFabrics group appears to be committed to maintaining this support in its software stack for the foreseeable future.

As an industry standard ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), iWARP is now backed by Intel, Broadcom, and Chelsio. Although Chelsio is the smallest of the three vendors, at this point it appears to be out ahead of its larger competitors. With the introduction of the T5, it is the only vendor that has married 40 Gig bandwidth and microsecond-level latencies to iWARP-style RDMA. Both Intel and Broadcom have 10 Gig implementations, but they are based on somewhat older technologies.

Intel, which inherited its 10GbE iWARP technology and expertise via its acquisition of NetEffect in 2008 hasn’t talked much about the product roadmap. However, along with Chelsio and Broadcom, Intel has been a driver in the most recent IETF extensions to the iWARP standard.

That suggests the chipmaker is going to move the NetEffect technology into the 40G realm (and beyond) at some point. And since Intel has outlined a network fabric strategy that integrates adapter logic into the CPU, it’s reasonable to assume that iWARP silicon could show up on x86 processors in the not-too-distant future.

None of that seems to worry Chelsio’s Naghshineh. According to him, their TCP offload technology leads the pack, which is probably why they sold 100,000 iWARP ports just in the last 12 months. What the market needs now though is a broader ecosystem, and that includes a reasonable number of iWARP providers committed to the technology. If Intel and Broadcom move ahead with their plans, that could provide the needed critical mass. “I’m very happy they are entering this market,” Naghshineh told HPCwire.

Thus far, most of Chelsio’s success has come from deployments in storage and virtualized servers, where the various network offloads supported by the adapter ASICs are used to save CPU cycles and boost performance. Chelsio’s penetration into the HPC space has been less sure – just a few university and commercial HPC installation to date. That’s due to a variety of factors, including delays in deployment of 10GbE technology overall and a perceived lack of iWARP performance relative to InfiniBand.

From Naghshineh’s perspective, the latter is just a marketing problem. There have been a number of studies that demonstrate even 10G iWARP performance is comparable to InfiniBand on typical HPC applications. One such analysis, performed by Chelsio, shows the its older T4 technology can perform as well or better than Mellanox’s FDR InfiniBand on typical MPI apps: LAMMPS (molecular dynamics), LS-DYNA (finite element analysis), WRF (weather forecasting), and HPL (Linpack).

Despite the FDR gear delivering four times the network bandwidth and half the latency of the Chelsio hardware, the study showed that the T4 iWARP implementation held its own across this application set. And the results seem to indicate that as the application scales up, the advantage starts to tilt in favor of iWARP. Since the newer T5 silicon brings the adapter bandwidth nearly up to FDR speeds (40Gbps versus 56Gbps) and latencies into the coveted sub-microsecond realm, Naghshineh expects the newer silicon to outperform the latest and greatest InfiniBand technology.

According to him, once they reach 100G iWARP in 2015, there will be no difference in performance between that and EDR InfiniBand, even at the hardware level. Naghshineh says that’s because the underlying SerDes (Serializer/Deserializer) architecture is converging across the different network technologies and that will become the common denominator determining performance.

Since Ethernet has the much larger ecosystem of switches, cables, optical modules, and software relative to InfiniBand, the economies of scale will naturally favor the high-volume solution, he maintains. And if performance and price are truly no longer differentiators between the two technologies, HPC users will come around. “InfiniBand has been a good solution to date, says Naghshineh. “It made sense to use it, but now the gap is essentially closed.”

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire