Focus on InfiniBand®
InfiniBand is gaining in popularity as an interconnect interface for high performance computing (HPC) clusters.
As supercomputing architectures (built using off-the-shelf server platforms) - are deployed for general applications InfiniBand is finding its way into new markets outside the classic government, academic, oil exploration and financial supercomputing domains. Pharamceutical, transportation, retail and media segments are demanding more and more floating point operations per second (FLOPS) to process their data.
The Missing Link
As part of our commitment to cover every possible network interface we are now able to offer packet capture and analysis support for InfiniBand datagrams without directly affecting the operation of these low-tolerance computing networks. With InfiniBand, it’s imperative that any analysing component does not impact the performance of the cluster being monitored at any point of the OSI-layer - from physical to transport and beyond.
Our InfiniBand monitoring solution feature an InfiniBand Tap Matrix switch that eliminates the need for a network SPAN port. The Tap Matrix is a programmable, passive, bi-directional physical (PHY) layer tap enabling up to 12 InfiniBand links to be monitored on demand without set-up outages or general disruption to the high-speed connection. Our approach does not participate in any aspect of the InfiniBand infrastructure (such as the media access control (MAC), network or transport layers) thereby enabling the device to remain transparent and secure while not adversely affecting the very cluster being monitored. Our agnostic approach enables the capture and analysis of any data transported over InfiniBand links, including IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB).
Endless Time
Our technology is capable of time stamping incoming InfiniBand datagrams - in hardware - with 7.5 nanosecond resolution and then filtering the traffic based on the connection type (i.e. reliable, unreliable or management datagrams - RD, UD and MAD). This hardware filtering enables analysis of just the traffic-of-interest, without adversely affecting the overall packet capture and analysis performance.
Power to see all
Naturally, time stamping and filtering is only part of the solution. For the captured data to be of use, it must be presented in a format suitable for further investigation. The Endace Wireshark® plug-in dissector for InfiniBand enables post analysis of datagrams by decoding the protocol stack for presentation within this powerful open source network sniffer application. This is in addition to Wireshark’s historical support for the Endace extensible record format (ERF) header that contains the time stamping information.