Performance evaluation of VBR traffic in InfiniBand

The InfiniBand architecture (IBA) is becoming an industry standard both for communication between processing nodes and I/O devices and for interprocessor communication. It replaces the traditional I/O bus with a switch-based interconnect for connecting processing nodes and I/O devices. It is being developed by the InfiniBand/sup SM/ Trade Association (IBTA) to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS) necessary for present and future server systems. For this, IBA provides a series of mechanisms that are able to guarantee QoS to the applications. Alfaro, Sanchez and Das (see Proceedings of International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, April 2002) proposed a strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables. We only evaluated our proposal for CBR traffic with fixed mean bandwidth requirements. We evaluate our strategy to compute the InfiniBand arbitration tables with VBR traffic. Performance results show that, this class of traffic also gets their QoS requirements.