First experience with the InfiniBand interconnect

A test cluster of dual Intel–Xeon processor server nodes has been equipped with 10 GBit/s InfiniBand interconnect. Capabilities of this new technique were tested and compared to Gigabit-Ethernet (GE) with respect to both High-Performance Computing (MPI-based parallel computing applications) and High-Throughput Computing (HTC). RFIO, a protocol for fast and efficient file transfers, has been ported to make immediate use of InfiniBand, utilizing the remote direct memory access (RDMA) capabilities of the InfiniBand hardware. The performance is compared to Gigabit-Ethernet.