Performance comparison of 20 Gbps and 40 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect

InfiniBand interconnect is a very important and crucial component of High Performance Computing Clusters. Overall performance of HPCC depends on many factors, among them InfiniBand throughput is the most crucial and critical factor. InfiniBand interconnect speed has increased rapidly during the last few years and currently InfiniBand is most popular interconnect for building HPCCs. High speed and low latency are the two technical features of InfiniBand interconnects, which provided impetus to wide spread usage of InfiniBand interconnect for building High Performance Computing Clusters. Large size InfiniBand switches at low costs also ushered proliferation of InfiniBand interconnects for building HPCCs. In this paper performance comparison of 20 Gbps and 40 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect for a small size HPCC has been presented. Experimental results obtained by using High Performance Linpack (HPL) software tool are also presented in form of tables and graphs. Detailed investigative discussions are also included in the paper.