InfiniBand: The 'De Facto' Future Standard for system and Local Area Networks or Just a Scalable Replacement for PCI Buses?

摘要

InfiniBand is a new industry-wide general-purpose interconnect standard designed to provide significantly higher levels of relia-bility, availability, performance, and scalability than alternative server I/O technologies. After more than two years since its official release, many are still trying to understand what are the profitable uses for this new and promising interconnect technology, and how this technology might evolve. In this article, we provide a summary of several industry and academic perspectives on this issue expressed during a panel discussion at the Workshop for Communication Architecture for Clusters (CAC), held in conjunction with the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) in April 2001, in hopes of narrowing down the design space for infiniBand-based systems.