An Introduction to the InfiniBand Architecture

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is a new industry-standard architecture for server I/O and inter-server communication. It was developed by the InfiniBand^SM Trade Association (IBTA) to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, and scalability necessary for present and future server systems, levels significantly better than can be achieved with bus-oriented I/O structures. This chapter provides a description of the reason IBA was developed, an brief overview of the architecture as a whole, more detailed information about several selected IBA topics, and discussion of industry implications of this architecture.