Introduction
This is the User Guide for InfiniBand/Ethernet adapter cards based on the NVIDIA® ConnectX®-4 integrated circuit device. These adapters connectivity provide the highest performing and most flexible interconnect solution for PCI Express Gen 3.0/4.0 servers used in Enterprise Data Centers, High-Performance Computing, and Embedded environments.
The following table provides the ordering part number, port speed, number of ports, and PCI Express speed. Each adapter comes with two bracket heights - short and tall.
ConnectX-4 InfiniBand/Ethernet FDR Adapter Cards
Part Number | MCX453A-FCAT | MCX455A-FCAT | MCX454A-FCAT | MCX456A-FCAT |
Data Rate | InfiniBand: SDR/DDR/QDR/FDR | |||
Network Connector Type | Single-port QSFP28 | Dual-port QSFP28 | ||
PCI Express Connectors | PCIe 3.0 x8 @ 8GT/s | PCIe 3.0 @ 8GT/s x16 | PCIe 3.0 x8 @ 8GT/s | PCIe 3.0 @ 8GT/s x16 |
Dimensions | 2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile | |||
RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |||
Adapter IC Part Number | MT27704A0-FDCF-FV | |||
Device ID (decimal) | 4115 for Physical Function (PF) |
ConnectX-4 InfiniBand/Ethernet EDR Adapter Cards
Part Number | MCX455A-ECAT | MCX456A-ECAT |
Data Rate | InfiniBand: SDR/DDR/QDR/FDR/EDR | |
Network Connector Type | Single-port QSFP28 | Dual-port QSFP28 |
PCI Express Connectors | PCIe Gen 3.0 x16; SerDes @ 8.0GT/s | |
Dimensions | 2.71 in. x 5.6 in. (68.90mm x 142.24 mm) – low profile | |
RoHS | RoHS Compliant | |
Adapter IC Part Number | MT27704A0-FDCF-EV | |
Device ID (decimal) | 4115 for Physical Function (PF) |
For more detailed information see Specifications.
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) through an x8 or x16 edge connector. Gen 1.1 and 2.0 compatible. |
EDR InfiniBand | 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. |
100Gb/s Adapter | ConnectX-4 offers the highest throughput InfiniBand/Ethernet adapter, supporting EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand and 100Gb/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-4 delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and computing efficiency for performance-driven server and storage clustering applications. ConnectX-4 is InfiniBand Architecture Specification v1.3 compliant. |
Up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet | NVIDIA adapters comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:
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Memory |
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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-4 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-4, 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-4 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-4 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 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 InfiniBand RDMA for high-performance storage access.
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SR-IOV | ConnectX-4 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server. |
RHEL/CentOS
Windows
FreeBSD
VMware
OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)
OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)
Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50/100 Gb/s Ethernet switches
Passive copper cable with ESD protection
Powered connectors for optical and active cable support