InfiniBand

InfiniBand Datasheet View datasheet Unique tool for InfiniBand deployments High-speed packet filtering and capture  Transparent to the HPC infrastructure  Flexible environment for customization  First Wireshark IB dissector plug-in  Support for most LAN/WAN interfaces  Exclusive programmable passive tap

To InfiniBand and Beyond

InfiniBand is increasingly gaining in popularity as a preferred interconnect interface for high performance computing (HPC) clusters.

As supercomputing architectures - built leveraging off-the-shelf server platforms - are deployed to meet the need of commercial applications, InfiniBand is now finding its way into new, broader, market segments.

Outside the classic government, educational research, oil exploration and financial supercomputing domains, pharmaceutical and transportation companies are progressively demanding greater processing power to develop new drugs, cars and airplanes, thereby negating the need for lengthy trials and modeling processes.

Furthermore, retail segments need to crunch large amounts of granular data to manage complex supply chains while, in the entertainment business, animation companies need an increasing number of floating point operations per second (FLOPS) to render ever more realistic feature-length movies.

The Missing Link

Endace is facilitating the mass-deployment of InfiniBand-interconnected HPC infrastructures with a range of products specifically designed to capture, measure and analyze InfiniBand datagrams without directly affecting the operation of these low-tolerance computing networks. 

Built on a foundation of proven DAG card technology, the Endace NinjaBox and NinjaProbe appliances have been widely deployed in applications ranging from guaranteed packet capture, timestamp and replay to network intrusion detection system (NIDS) acceleration.

The Ninja product portfolio leverages standard server hardware running a commercial operating system but provides high speed packet capture while freeing CPU processing power to concurrently run monitoring or analysis tools and applications. This is made possible by employing data agnostic, interrupt free, direct memory access (DMA) and zero-copy first-in / first out (FIFO) memory mapping techniques along with traffic filtering and intelligent flow-based inverse multiplexing to multiple CPU cores

Passive Analysis

With InfiniBand, it is especially important that any analyzing component not impact the performance of the cluster being monitored at any point of the OSI-layer - from physical to transport and beyond. Firstly, the Endace solution features the NinjaITM - an InfiniBand Tap Matrix switch that eliminates the need for a network SPAN port. The NinjaITM is a programmable, passive, bi-directional physical (PHY) layer tap enabling up to 12 InfiniBand links to be monitored on demand and without set-up outages or general disruption to the high-speed connection. Secondly, the Ninja product range 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. This agnostic approach enables the capture and analysis of any data transported over InfiniBand links, including IP over InfiniBand (IPoIB).

Endless Time

Both the NinjaBox and NinjaProbe appliances are 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 of the platform.

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, along with other data garnered as part of the packet capture process. While the InfiniBand plug-in can be instantiated within any Wireshark deployment, the Endace NinaProbe and NinjaBox platforms provide the ideal local environment from which to run this powerful analysis tool.

Unlimited Potential

Finally, with InfiniBand playing a critical but still comparatively small part of an overall networked computing environment, the Endace product line provides a common solution for monitoring most widely-deployed local and wide area network interfaces - from T1/E1 to OC-768/STM-256 and 10/100 to 10Gb Ethernet. The NinjaBox and NinjaProbe platforms are flexible and powerful enough to meet practically all your network monitoring demands.