The Mellanox Virtual Protocol Interconnect (VPI) architecture provides a high performance, low latency and reliable means for communication among network adapters and switches supporting both InfiniBand and Ethernet semantics. A VPI adapter or switch can be set to deliver either InfiniBand or Ethernet semantics per port. A dual-port VPI adapter, for example, can be configured to one of the following options:
An adapter (HCA) with two InfiniBand ports
A NIC with two Ethernet ports
An adapter with one InfiniBand port and one Ethernet port at the same time
Similarly, a VPI switch can have InfiniBand-only ports, Ethernet-only ports, or a mix of both InfiniBand and Ethernet ports working at the same time.
Mellanox-based VPI adapters and switches support both the InfiniBand RDMA and the Ethernet RoCE solutions.