ConnectX-4 100Gb/s Ethernet Dual Port Adapter Card User Manual for Dell PowerEdge
Rev 1.2
Mellanox Technologies
13
1.2
Features and Benefits
Table 4 - Features
a
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (1.1 and 2.0 compatible) through an x16 edge connector up to
8GT/s
Up to 100 Gigabit
Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
– 100GbE / 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE
– IEEE 802.3bj, 802.3bm 100 Gigabit Ethernet
– 25G Ethernet Consortium 25,50 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3by 25 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet
– IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KRstartup
– IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link Aggregation
– IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and priority
– IEEE 802.1Qau (QCN) – Congestion Notification
– IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
– IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC) 802.1Qbg
– IEEE 1588v2
– Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)
Memory
PCI Express - stores and accesses Ethernet fabric connection information and
packet data.
SPI - includes one 16MB SPI Flash device (M25PX16-VMN6P device by ST
Microelectronics)
EEPROM capacity is 128Kb.
Overlay Networks
In order to better scale their networks, data center operators often create overlay
networks that carry traffic from individual virtual machines over logical tunnels
in encapsulated formats such as NVGRE and VXLAN. While this solves network
scalability issues, it hides the TCP packet from the hardware offloading engines,
placing higher loads on the host CPU. ConnectX-4 effectively addresses this by
providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that
encapsulate and decapsulate the overlay protocol.
RDMA and RDMA over
Converged Ethernet
(RoCE)
ConnectX-4, utilizing IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE
(RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-latency and high-
performance over InfiniBand and Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center
bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 advanced congestion control
hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over
Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.
Mellanox PeerDirect™
PeerDirect™ communication provides high efficiency RDMA access by eliminat-
ing unnecessary internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for
example, from GPU to CPU), and therefore significantly reduces application run
time. ConnectX-4 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster effi-
ciency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
CPU offload
Adapter functionality enabling reduced CPU overhead allowing more available
CPU for computation tasks.
