Tutorial 2: InfiniBand Architecture and Where it is Headed

This tutorial is intended to provide an in-depth overview of the emerging InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) standard. This new architecture incorporates high performance I/O in addition to interprocessor communication, provides QoS and protection in the network, provides multiple transport services, and allows flexibility of IBA subnets to be connected to Wide Area Networks (WANs) through routers. The IBA standard incorporates many of the Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) functions at its verbs layer. The tutorial will demonstrate how high performance communication and I/O architectures for scalable systems can be designed with this standard by taking into account interprocessor communication, network communication, and communication to I/O devices. The basic components of the IBA standard and multiple layers of this architecture will be described in detail.