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1 Overview
1.1 Introduction
The Ammasso 1100 High Performance Ethernet Adapter is a RDMA enabled Ethernet Server
adapter offering high performance for server to server networking environments. The
Ammasso 1100 is also a gigabit Ethernet adapter and works within any gigabit Ethernet
environment supporting existing standard wiring, switches, and other Ethernet adapters.
Using the Ammasso adapter requires installing it into a PCI-X slot, loading the software and
assigning IP addresses to the adapter, one for RDMA traffic and one for standard sockets
traffic. The adapter has several features that deliver higher levels of performance:
•
Low latency
•
Reduced copies
•
Reduced host CPU overhead
These features are accomplished through the use of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access)
technology and CPU offload. RDMA moves data from the memory of one server directly
into the memory of another server over a network without involving the CPU of either server.
CPU offload lowers the processing requirements on the host CPU when using RDMA,
increasing its efficiency. Low latency assures that the time it takes for data to get from one
application to the other is minimized, while increasing the overall message capacity of the
network.
The combination of these features reduces application data transfer times. They combine to
enable distributed databases to scale more effectively improving performance on individual
servers and providing better scalability to larger clusters. Compute clusters attain higher
performance levels with improved inter-node communication and reduced CPU loads. Lastly
for traditional network attached storage (NAS) installations, storage solutions deliver data
faster without additional CPU overhead..