On 4 Feb 2011, at 15:37, Doug Hughes wrote:

> On 2/4/2011 9:25 AM, Yves Dorfsman wrote:
>>> I have some trouble with infiniband - and admittedly I am an infiniband
>>> novice. I get 7GBit/s using TCP (iperf/wget and others). Oddly though
>>> because it's a QDR (40GBit/s) switch.
>>> Same results with 2.6.36, 2.6.38-rc2 kernel.
>>> QLogic PCI-e cards and QLogic switches.
>>> 
>>> I changed kernels/bios/tcp settings and what have you, but no luck. I
>>> notice the cpu can be quite busy during these tests.
>>> 
>>> Anyone seen something like this before or knows more about inifiniband
>>> than me ? ;))
>> Yes we ran into a similar issue. We had put the IB card in the first 
>> available
>> PCIU slot on the machines. On most machines some PCI slot are faster than
>> others, these IB needed to be on a faster slot to be able to attain maximum
>> speeds, of course this wasn't documented.
>> 
>> Look for "connector width", on newer machines you typically have slots with
>> "x8" and one or two with "x16" width. Move the cards to the faster/widest 
>> slots.
>> 
> I'm going to reply to a whole bunch of messages in this thread, so just 
> be advised that I'm not picking on any one in particular.
> 
> Let's assume that the original card in questions is a QDR card. That 

correct.

> means 40Gbits/sec, but infiniband has an 8/10 overhead for encoding, so 
> the actual maximum achievable bandwidth is 32Gbits/sec. (Anybody that 
> says 35 is trying to pull something). DDR
> infiniband is 20 gbits/sec (actually 16). In the next version of 
> Infiniband, later this year, they eliminate the 8/10 off-the-top 
> overhead, for what it's worth.

good point.
I checked back myself and found this by mellanox:
http://www.mellanox.com/content/pages.php?pg=performance_infiniband
where the list 2950MB/s (23600Mb/s). Makes it easier to believe - but even 
though I am far away from that yet ;
[...]
> 
> Re: 7gbits/etc. As others have said, you're over-running your CPU. IP 
> over IB works just fine, but the packet sizes aren't matched up. What 
> you really want to do is test it using actual native infiniband 
> protocols. I recommend the Intel Benchmark Suite (IBM - nee Pallas). It 
> will test infiniband typical MPI operations.

Fair enough, problem is, I am trying to provide highspeed internet access to 
clients and they need tcp/ip (only). So I got to improve the speed of IPoIB.
And yes, we have >20GBit/s internet connectivity.

Conrad


h
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