Three report advances for Infiniband infrastructure
By Jerry Ascierto
EE Times
(06/27/01, 12:20 p.m. EST)
ORLANDO, Fla. - QLogic, Cypress and Intel have each made progress in their efforts to round out the burgeoning Infiniband infrastructure, according to announcements made at the recent Infiniband Developers Conference.
Intel Corp. used prereleased silicon and software to demonstrate an Infiniband enterprise-class application, database and infrastructure for the first time at the conference, held here. The demonstration underscored the progress made in the months since Infiniband's initial spec was unveiled. Intel tapped Dell's PowerEdge servers, QLogic switches, its own silicon and software, IBM's DB2 Universal Database V7.2 and publicly available Linux distributions running kernel 2.4 for the demo.
"We're not just talking about sending bits back and forth," said Philip Brace, director of platform marketing for Intel's fabric components division (Santa Clara, Calif.). "We're talking about running real solutions to real problems now. We had our first samples in January and now, only six months later, we're talking about real enterprise-class applications running on Infiniband."
While other Intel-led industry consortiums - USB 2.0, for example - have missed deadlines, Brace said Infiniband-enabled systems will be shown at Comdex/Fall.
Not a replacement
And while the fabric's revolutionary nature makes such demonstrations critical, Intel insists that Infiniband isn't meant to replace existing interconnect technologies, such as PCI-X. "What we're bringing is new levels of capability, mainframe-class I/O capability, to volume server economics," Brace said. "We're not advocating you swap out your existing infrastructure."
QLogic Corp. (Aliso Viejo, Calif.) said it plans to commercialize the first Infiniband architecture-to-Fibre Channel I/O module, designed to connect Fibre Channel storage-area networks to servers. A prototype of the module was on display in the Intel demonstration, showcasing dual independent 2-Gbit Fibre Channel ports and a 4x Infiniband connection, which can pass data at 20 Gbits/second.
Cypress Semiconductor Corp., which has already announced a family of programmable PHY devices for Infiniband, showcased its Infiniband intellectual-property core. The core can be implemented into the company's 2.5-Gbit/s programmable PHY, leaving approximately 50,000 gates left over for custom logic.
Available this month, the core features comma detect, 8B/10B encoder/decoder, 16-bit parallel-to-serial conversion in the transmit path, serial-to-16-bit-parallel conversion in the receive path and clock-tolerance compensation logic.
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