Introduction
Rev 2.5
16
Mellanox Technologies
1.4
Features and Benefits
Table 5 - Features
a
PCI Express (PCIe)
Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (1.1 and 2.0 compatible) through an x8 FCI B2Bconnector up to 8GT/s
Up to 25/50 Gigabit
Ethernet
Mellanox adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
– 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
– 25G Ethernet Consortium 25
– 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 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)
Memory
PCI Express - stores and accesses Ethernet fabric connection information and packet data.
SPI - includes one 16MB SPI Flash device (W25Q128FVSIG device by WINBOND-
NUVOTON).
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 for-
mats 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 Lx effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and
VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay proto-
col header as well as offloads TCP stateless activities on the encapsulated packet.
RDMA and RDMA over
Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
ConnectX-4 Lx, utilizing IBTA RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology,
delivers low-latency and high-performance over Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center
bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-4 Lx advanced congestion control hard-
ware 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-4 Lx
advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency 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 requirements for
latency and SLA.
Hardware-based I/O
Virtualization
ConnectX-4 Lx provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protec-
tion for virtual machines within the server.
Storage Acceleration
A consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost-performance advan-
tages over multi-fabric networks. Standard block and
file access protocols can leverage RDMA for high-performance storage access.