We talked a few days ago a solution Asus equipped with InfiniBand connector. InfiniBand, to reiterate, is a technology that can transfer data very fast (40 gigabits per second with the final implementation) and used (for example) as an alternative interconnection in clusters. And NVIDIA with its latest solutions, thus supporting InfiniBand.

Tesla and InfiniBand

The interest is simple: currently, to synchronize the results of individual cluster members must go through the network and especially by the CPU. And this last point is a default CPU uses part of his power for tasks without practical interests, which may (in some cases) become a bottleneck. With the new solution using InfiniBand technology and Mellanox - like all the latest listings based InfiniBand - it is possible to move the CPU to manage the connection between cluster members. Moreover, clusters tend to use Ethernet to 10 Gigabit / s for interconnection, while InfiniBand achieves 40 Gbit / s. And since there are protocols EoIB and FCoIB that allow (respectively) using InfiniBand Ethernet and Fiber Channel over InfiniBand, the setup is fairly simple.

In fact, NVIDIA does offer this technology on the system dedicated to clusters or the 1U Tesla (the existing S1070 and S2050 and S2070 future).