User Manual

Rev 2.3-1.0.1

Mellanox Technologies

1 Introduction

1.1 Overview

Mellanox OFED is a single Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) software stack which operates

across all Mellanox network adapter solutions supporting 10, 20, 40 and 56 Gb/s InfiniBand (IB);

10, 40 and 56 Gb/s Ethernet; and 2.5 or 5.0 GT/s PCI Express 2.0 and 8 GT/s PCI Express 3.0

uplinks to servers.

All Mellanox network adapter cards are compatible with OpenFabrics-based RDMA protocols

and software, and are supported with major operating system distributions.

Mellanox OFED is certified with the following products:

• Mellanox Messaging Accelerator (VMA™) software: Socket acceleration library that

performs OS bypass for standard socket based applications.

• Mellanox Unified Fabric Manager (UFM®) software: Powerful platform for managing

demanding scale-out computing fabric environments, built on top of the OpenSM

industry standard routing engine.

• Fabric Collective Accelerator (FCA) - FCA is a Mellanox MPI-integrated software

package that utilizes CORE-Direct technology for implementing the MPI collectives

communications.

1.2 Stack Architecture

Figure 1 shows a diagram of the Mellanox OFED stack, and how upper layer protocols (ULPs)

interface with the hardware and with the kernel and user space. The application level also shows

the versatility of markets that Mellanox OFED applies to.

Figure 1: Mellanox OFED Stack for ConnectX® Family Adapter Cards

The following sub-sections briefly describe the various components of the Mellanox OFED

stack.