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Mellanox Showcases Single-Chip 10 Gb Per Second Adapter

Continuing its history of offering price/performance leadership in high performance data center interconnect solutions, Mellanox Technologies Ltd launched the world's first single-chip 10 Gb per second InfiniBand adapters. These single-chip adapters take advantage of Mellanox's patent-pending "MemFree" technology, which significantly reduces the cost, power, and board space required for 10 Gb per second nodes in data center and technical computing server clusters. Industry-standard InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA) devices with MemFree technology are available today and remove the requirement for local memory on both PCI Express adapter cards and Landed on Motherboard (LOM) designs.

Eliminating local adapter memory is ideal for server blade architectures that benefit greatly from 10Gb per second performance between blades and reductions in cost, power, and board footprint. Mellanox's single-chip 10 Gb per second adapters deliver the following advantages:

"With the introduction of the first single-chip 10 Gb per second adapter, Mellanox is aggressively executing down a path of InfiniBand cost reductions that will enable our OEM customers with sub $100 10 Gb per second server adapter solutions by 1Q2005, and even lower price points soon thereafter," said Kevin Deierling, vice president of product marketing for Mellanox Technologies. "The MemFree capability is a key feature that establishes InfiniBand's price performance leadership, and simplifies the integration of 10 Gb per second connectivity in servers, server blades and storage systems."

"Mellanox's single-chip InfiniBand adapters should increase the adoption rate of 10 Gb per second server and storage clustering," stated Jag Bolaria, senior ANalyst of The Linley Group. "The company's MemFree technology reduces system cost, power, and space requirements. These factors combined with Mellanox's performance roadmap should accelerate adoption of InfiniBand technology on servers and storage platforms."

How MemFree Technology Works

Today, existing InfiniBand Host Channel Adapters (HCA) provide 10 Gb per second server-to-server and server-to-storage I/O interconnect, and require up to 256MB of DDR memory which is directly controlled by the HCA device. This memory typically consists of multiple chips soldered directly on adapter cards and motherboards, or may take the form of a pluggable memory DIMM (Dual In-Line Memory Module). This local HCA memory, completely separate from system memory used by the CPU and other peripherals in the server, is used to store information about the connections each node has with the rest of the nodes in the cluster. Depending upon the size of the cluster, multiple connections exist between any two nodes and information on hundreds of thousands or even millions of connections may need to be stored in local memory. For performance reasons, this information needs to be closely coupled with the HCA to enable fast access.

With Intel's recent announcement of the E7520 and E7320 Server Chipsets supporting the new high speed PCI Express interface from the InfiniBand HCA to system memory, it is possible to remove the requirement for locally-attached memory. Using PCI Express, throughput and latency is enhanced, enabling system memory to be used to store connection information. The end result is a single-chip, cost-effective, 10 Gb per second I/O solution that only InfiniBand and PCI Express can provide.

"Innovation and investment in new technology for PCI Express architecture, such as the Mellanox's MemFree capabilities of the InfiniBand HCA are of great benefit to the industry," said Tom MacDonald, vice president and general manager of Advanced Components Division of Intel's Enterprise Platforms Group.