This is the User Guide for Ethernet adapter cards based on the ConnectX®-6 InfiniBand/Ethernet integrated circuit device for OCP Spec 3.0. These adapters connectivity provide the highest performing low latency and most flexible interconnect solution for PCI Express Gen 3.0/4.0 servers used in Enterprise Data Centers and High-Performance Computing environments.
The following provides the ordering part number, port speed, number of ports, and PCI Express speed.
Important Note:
ConnectX-6 OCP 3.0 cards were tested for Shock & Vibe in accordance with NVIDIA specifications and setups as defined in document XXX, as the OCP spec 3.0 available at that time did not contain any S&V definitions. A newer version of the OCP spec 3.0 has defined S&V specifications and NVIDIA is in the midst of retesting these cards to comply with OCP spec 3.0.
Products Overview
| Model | Cards for OCP Spec 3.0 | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part Number | MCX653435A-HDAI | MCX653436A-HDAI | MCX653435A-HDAE(a) | MCX653436A-HDAB | MCX653435A-EDAI | |
| Host Management | √ | √ | √ | √ | √ | |
| Network Connector Type | Single-port QSFP56 | Dual-port QSFP56 | Single-port QSFP56 | Dual-port QSFP56 | Single-port QSFP56 | |
Data Rate | InfiniBand | SDR/DDR/QDR/FDR/EDR/HDR100/HDR | SDR/DDR/QDR/FDR/EDR/HDR100 | |||
| Ethernet | 10/25/40/50/100/200 Gb/s | 10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s | ||||
| PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 / 4.0 x16 | |||||
| Dimensions | Small Form Factor (SFF) OCP 3.0 | |||||
| Retention Mechanism | Internal Lock | Ejector Latch | Pull Tab (Thumbscrew) | Internal Lock | ||
| RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |||||
| IC Part Number | MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM | MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM | MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM | MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM | MT28908A0-XCCF-HVM | |
| Device ID | 4123 for Physical Function (PF) | |||||
a. MCX653435A-HDAE - The Gen 4.0 card has been tested and certified with PCIe 3.0 servers. PCIe 4.0 interface will be tested when servers with Gen 4.0 support become available.
For more detailed information see Specifications.
Features and Benefits
This section describes hardware features and capabilities. Please refer to the relevant driver and/or firmware release notes for feature availability.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| PCI Express (PCIe) | Uses PCIe Gen 3.0 (8GT/s) or Gen 4.0 (16GT/s) through x16 edge connector. |
200Gb/s InfiniBand/Ethernet Adapter | ConnectX-6 offers the highest throughput InfiniBand/Ethernet adapter, supporting HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand and 200Gb/s Ethernet and enabling any standard networking, clustering, or storage to operate seamlessly over any converged network leveraging a consolidated software stack. |
| 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. |
| InfiniBand HDR | A standard InfiniBand data rate, where each lane of a 4X port runs a bit rate of 53.125Gb/s with a 64b/66b encoding, resulting in an effective bandwidth of 200Gb/s. |
| 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. |
| Up to 200 Gigabit Ethernet | NVIDIA adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards: • 200GbE / 100GbE / 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE |
| InfiniBand EDR | A standard InfiniBand data rate, where each lane of a 4X port runs a bit rate of 25.78125Gb/s with a 64b/66b encoding, resulting in an effective bandwidth of 100Gb/s. |
| Memory Components |
|
| 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 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 Band and Ethernet networks. Leveraging data center 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. |
| 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 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. |
| 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 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 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 |
| 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. |
| Reset-on-LAN (RoL) | Supported |
Operating Systems/Distributions
- RHEL/CentOS
- Windows
- FreeBSD
- VMware
- OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
- OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)
Connectivity
- Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50/100/200 Gb/s Ethernet switches
- Passive copper cable with ESD protection
- Powered connectors for optical and active cable support
