Tutorial: Infiniband and 10-Gigabit Ethernet for Dummies

InfiniBand Architecture (IB) and 10-Gigabit Ethernet (10GE) technologies are generating significant excitement towards building next generation high-end computing (HEC) systems. This tutorial will provide an overview of these emerging technologies, their offered features, their current market standing, and their suitability for prime-time HEC. It will start with a brief overview of IB, 10 GE, and their architectural features. An overview of the emerging OpenFabrics stack which encapsulates both IB and 10 GE in a unified manner will be presented. Issues related to converged/unified fabric will be discussed. IB and 10 GE hardware/software solutions and the market trends will be highlighted. Finally, sample performance numbers highlighting the performance these technologies can achieve in different environments such as MPI, sockets, parallel file systems and multi-tier datacenters, will be shown.