Performance of Voltaire InfiniBand in IBM 64-Bit Commodity HPC Clusters

Overview

In this paper, the performance of Voltaire InfiniBand using 100 MHz PCI-X, 133 MHz PCI-X and PCI-Express slots has been examined. In this experimentation it is found that InfiniBand exhibits high throughput (1,735 MB/s) and low latency (4 microseconds) when used with PCI-Express. With 133 MHz PCI-X it also shows low latency (5 microseconds) and high bandwidth (788 MB/s), considering the limitations of its slot. InfiniBand shows consistent performance over a range of message sizes.