ConnectX®-3 Pro Ethernet Dual SFP+ Port Adapter Card User Manual
Rev 1.0
Mellanox Technologies
11
1.2
Features and Benefits
Table 4 - Features
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (1.1 and 2.0 compatible) through an x8 edge connector up to
8GT/s
10 Gigabit Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3* standards:
IEEE Std 802.3-2008 Ethernet
IEEE Std 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
IEEE Std 802.3ad Link Aggregation and Failover
Memory
PCI Express - stores and accesses InfiniBand and/or Ethernet fabric connection
information and packet data
SPI - includes one 4MB SPI Flash device (M25PX16-VMN6P device by ST
Microelectronics)
EEPROM - accessible through the I
2
C-compatible interface. The EEPROM
capacity is 4Kb.
Virtualized Overlay
Networks
ConnectX-3 Pro effectively addresses the increasing demand for an overlay net-
work, enabling superior performance by introducing advanced NVGRE and
VXLAN hardware offload engines that enable the traditional offloads to be per-
formed on the encapsulated traffic. With ConnectX-3 Pro, data center operators
can decouple the overlay network layer from the physical NIC performance, thus
achieving native performance in the new network architecture.
RDMA over Converged
Ethernet (RoCE)
Leveraging Data Center Bridging capabilities, RoCE provides efficient low
latency RDMA services over Layer 2 Ethernet.
CPU offload
Adapter functionality enabling reduced CPU overhead allowing more available
CPU
GPUDirect RDMA
Using GPUDirect RDMA, adapters can directly read and write CUDA host and
device memory, eliminating unnecessary system memory copies and CPU over-
head, resulting in significant performance improvements.
Sockets Acceleration
Applications utilizing TCP/UDP/IP transport can achieve industry leading
throughput over InfiniBand or 10/40/56GbE. The hardware-based stateless
offload engines in ConnectX-3 Pro reduce the CPU overhead of IP packet trans-
port. Sockets acceleration software further increases performance for latency sen-
sitive applications.
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-3 Pro provides dedicated adapter resourcesand guaranteed isolation
and protection for virtual machines within the server.
SR-IOV
ConnectX-3 Pro SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and
guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.
I/O virtualization with ConnectX-3 Pro gives data center managers better server
utilization while reducing cost, power, and cable complexity.
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 RDMA for high-performance storage access.
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