Design and Performance Evaluation of IPoIB Gateway

InfiniBand provides a high-bandwidth, low-latency network, and has been widely adopted in modern storage and computing systems. However, Ethernet fabric is still widely used which has different characteristics in protocol and performance. Therefore, an Ethernet-to-InfiniBand gateway must be built to implement protocol conversion and bandwidth aggregation. This paper introduces a software implementation of Ethernet-to-InfiniBand gateway based on IPoIB protocol. Moreover, several network test tools are compared and used to evaluate the performance of IPoIB gateway. Performance evaluation results show that IP fragmentation operations and high CPU utilization of software interruption are the bottlenecks of the system, and they are good references for the design of hardware Ethernet-to-InfiniBand gateway