HP Fabric Clustering System HP-UX Administrator's Guide, March 2008

1 Introduction to Technology
Understanding the Fabric Clustering System
HP Fabric Clustering System
The HP Fabric Clustering System provides a high-performance InfiniBand computing environment
intended for use for applications sensitive to latency, bandwidth, and CPU-consumption.
HP Fabric is an RDMA-interconnect. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) technology allows
cooperating endnodes to expose their local memory buffers for direct data placement by peer
endnodes (including loop back operation) over reliable communication fabrics (fabrics may be
internal, e.g. an endnode backplane, or external, e.g., an I/O attached device / fabric). RDMA
technology reduces the performance constraints imposed by memory subsystem bottlenecks on
networked computing systems.
Readers are advised also to consult the InfiniBand specifications found at
http://www.infinibandta.org for more information on the technology.
Understanding InfiniBand™
This section provides a brief and high-level overview of the InfiniBand architecture.
What is InfiniBand?
InfiniBand is supported by HP Fabric Clustering System as a fabric for high-performance technical
computing clusters and as a fabric for commercial database clusters.
InfiniBand is a switched I/O fabric architecture. It was created to meet the increasing demands
of the data center, and allows data centers to harness server computing power by delivering an
I/O fabric that provides reliable low latency communication both from one server to another
server, and between server and their shared I/O resources.
InfiniBand technology refers to both a communications and management infrastructure that
increases the communication speed between CPUs, devices within servers, and subsystems
located throughout a network. It defines a switched communications fabric that allows many
devices to concurrently communicate with high-bandwidth and low latency in a protected, easily
managed environment.
InfiniBand Advantages
Infiniband addresses four problems:
• Application to application latency.
• Application CPU consumption.
• Network bandwidth.
• Fabric Management.
InfiniBand Capabilities
InfiniBand is a standard-based interconnect that enables:
• High-bandwidth, 10 Gbps connectivity
• Extremely low-latency Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)
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