Use of provisional routes to speed-up change assimilation in InfiniBand networks

Summary form only given. The InfiniBand architecture has been proposed as a technology both for communication between processing nodes and I/O devices, and for interprocessor communication. The InfiniBand specification defines a basic management infrastructure that is responsible for subnet configuration, activation, and fault tolerance. Each time a topology change is detected, management entities collect the current subnet topology. After that, new forwarding tables have to be computed and uploaded to routing devices. The time required to compute these tables is a critical issue, due to application traffic being negatively affected by the temporary lack of connectivity. We present a way to compute a valid set of subnet routes in a short period of time. These provisional routes can be immediately distributed to routing devices. After that, final routes can be later uploaded without affecting user traffic.