11
Mellanox Technologies Confidential
Rev 1.1
1.3
Features and Benefits
NOTE:
Make sure to use a PCIe slot that is capable of supplying the required power
and airflow to the ConnectX-6 cards as stated in
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses the following PCIe interfaces:
PCIe x16 configurations:
PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) and Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) through an x16 edge connector.
2x PCIe x16 configurations:
PCIe Gen 3.0/4.0 SERDES @ 8.0/16.0 GT/s through Edge Connector
PCIe Gen 3.0 SERDES @ 8.0GT/s through PCIe Auxiliary Connection Card
InfiniBand Architecture
Specification v1.3
compliant
ConnectX-6 delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and computing efficiency for performance-
driven server and storage clustering applications. ConnectX-6 is InfiniBand Architecture
Specification v1.3 compliant.
Up to 100 Gigabit
Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
100GbE / 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
- IEEE 802.3bj, 802.3bm 100 Gigabit Ethernet
- IEEE 802.3by, Ethernet Consortium25, 50 Gigabit Ethernet, supporting all FEC modes
- IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
- IEEE 802.3by 25 Gigabit Ethernet
- IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
- IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KR startup
- 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)
- IEEE 802.1Qbg
- IEEE 1588v2
- Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)
InfiniBand HDR100
A standard InfiniBand data rate, where each lane of a 2X port runs a bit rate of 53.125Gb/s
with a 64b/66b encoding, resulting in an effective bandwidth of 100Gb/s.
Memory Components
•
SPI Quad - includes 256Mbit SPI Quad Flash device
•
FRU EEPROM - The EEPROM capacity is 128Kbit.
Overlay Networks
In order to better scale their networks, datacenter 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-6 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware
offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol.
RDMA and RDMA over
Converged Ethernet
(RoCE)
ConnectX-6, 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 datacenter bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as
ConnectX-6 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 eliminating unnecessary
internal data copies between components on the PCIe bus (for example, from GPU to CPU),
and therefore significantly reduces application run time. ConnectX-6 advanced acceleration
technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.
