ConnectX®-4 VPI Single and Dual QSFP28 Port Adapter Card User Manual for Dell PowerEdge
Rev 1.3
Mellanox Technologies
13
1.3
Operating Systems/Distributions
• RHEL/CentOS
• FreeBSD
• OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
1.4
Connectivity
• Interoperable with InfiniBand or 10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet switches
• Passive copper cable with ESD protection
• Powered connectors for optical and active cable support
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.
Quality of Service (QoS)
Support for port-based Quality of Service enabling various application require-
ments for latency and SLA.
Hardware-based I/O
Virtualization
ConnectX-4 provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and
protection for virtual machines within the server.
Storage Acceleration
A consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost-perfor-
mance advantages over multi-fabric networks. Standard block and
file access protocols can leverage InfiniBand RDMA for high-performance stor-
age access.
SR-IOV
ConnectX-4 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and
guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.
a. This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the driver release notes for feature availability. See
Table 2, “Documents List,” on page 8
Table 4 - Features
a
