Introduction

PCI Express (PCIe)

Uses PCIe Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) through x8 edge connector.

Up to 200 Gigabit Ethernet

NVIDIA adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:

• 200GbE / 100GbE / 50GbE / 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

• Proprietary Ethernet protocols (20/40GBASE-R2, 50GBASE-R4)

• 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 Components

• EEPROM - The EEPROM capacity is 32Kbit. FRU I²C address is (0x50) and is accessible through the PCIe SMBus (Note: A ddress 0x58 is reserved.)

• SPI Quad - includes 256Mbit SPI Quad Flash device (MX25L25645GXDI-08G device by Macronix)

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®-6 Lx 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 Lx, utilizing RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-latency and high-performance over Band and Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center bridging (DCB) capabilities, as well as ConnectX®-6 Lx, advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.

NVIDIA 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 Lx advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.

CPU Offload

Adapter functionality enables reduced CPU overhead leaving more CPU resources available for computation tasks.

Open vSwitch (OVS) offload using ASAP^2(TM)

• Flexible match-action flow tables

• Tunneling encapsulation/decapsulation

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®-6 Lx 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-performance advantages over multi-fabric networks. Standard block and file access protocols can leverage RDMA for high-performance storage access.

• NVMe over Fabric offloads for the target machine

SR-IOV

ConnectX®-6 Lx SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.

NC-SI

The adapter supports a Network Controller Sideband Interface (NC-SI), MCTP over SMBus and MCTP over PCIe - Baseboard Management Controller interface.

High-Performance Accelerations

• Tag Matching and Rendezvous Offloads

• Adaptive Routing on Reliable Transport

• Burst Buffer Offloads for Background Checkpointing

Host Management

NVIDIA host management sideband implementations enable remote monitor and control capabilities using RBT, MCTP over SMBus, and MCTP over PCIe – Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) interface, supporting both NC-SI and PLDM management protocols using these interfaces. NVIDIA OCP 3.0 adapters support these protocols to offer numerous Host Management features such as PLDM for Firmware Update, network boot in UEFI driver, UEFI secure boot, and more.

Secure Boot

Hardware Root-of-Trust (RoT) Secure Boot and secure firmware update using RSA cryptography, and cloning-protection, via a device-unique secret key.

Crypto

Crypto – IPsec and TLS data-in-motion inline encryption and decryption offload and AES-XTS block-level data-at-rest encryption and decryption offload.

Wake-on-LAN (WoL)

The adapter supported Wake-on-LAN (WoL), a computer networking standard that allows an adapter to be turned on or awakened by a network message.

In STBY mode, only port0 is available.

Reset-on-LAN (RoL)

Supported

Connection tracking

ConnectX-6 Lx ASAP² connection-tracking hardware offload accelerates L4 firewall performance.

IPSec Offload (in selected OPNs)

ConnectX-6 Lx adapters offer a range of advanced built-in capabilities that bring infrastructure security down to every endpoint with unprecedented performance and scalability. ConnectX-6 Lx offers IPsec inline encryption/decryption acceleration to offload the CPU and run the entire data path encryption or decryption in the NIC hardware while maintaining the line rate.

Secure Boot (Hardware Root Of Trust)

ConnectX-6 Lx delivers supply chain protection with hardware Root-of-Trust (RoT) for Secure Boot as well as Secure Firmware Update using RSA cryptography and cloning protection, via a device-unique key, to guarantee firmware authenticity