Introduction

PCI Express slot

In PCIe x16 Configuration

PCIe Gen 5.0 (32GT/s) through x16 edge connector.

In Socket Direct Configuration (2x PCIe x16)

• PCIe Gen 4.0/5.0 SERDES @16/32GT/s through edge connector

• PCIe Gen 4.0 SERDES @16GT/s through PCIe Auxiliary Connection Card

System Power Supply

Refer to Specifications

Operating System

• In-box drivers for major operating systems:

  • Linux: RHEL, Ubuntu

  • Windows

• Virtualization and containers

  • VMware ESXi (SR-IOV)

  • Kubernetes

• OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED)

• OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)

Connectivity

• Interoperable with 1/10/25/40/50/100/200/400 Gb/s Ethernet switches and SDR/DDR/EDR/HDR100/HDR/NDR200/NDR InfiniBand switches

• Passive copper cable with ESD protection

• Powered connectors for optical and active cable support

According to the OPN you have purchased, the card uses the following PCIe express interfaces:

• PCIe x16 configurations:

  PCIe Gen 4.0/5.0 (16GT/s / 32GT/s) through x16 edge connector.

• 2x PCIe x16 configurations (Socket-Direct):

  PCIe Gen 4.0/5.0 ( SERDES @ 16GT/s / 32GT/s) through x16 edge connector

  PCIe Gen 4.0 SERDES @ 16GT/s through PCIe Auxiliary Connection Card

ConnectX-7 delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and computing efficiency for high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and hyperscale cloud data center applications. ConnectX-7 is InfiniBand Architecture Specification v1.5 compliant.

InfiniBand Network Protocols and Rates:

ConnectX-7 adapter cards comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:

400GbE / 200GbE / 100GbE / 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE

• SPI - includes 256Mbit SPI Quad Flash device.

• FRU EEPROM - Stores the parameters and personality of the card. The EEPROM capacity is 128Kbit. FRU I2C address is (0x50) and is accessible through the PCIe SMBus. (Note: A ddress 0x58 is reserved.)

In order to better scale their networks, datacenter 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-7 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol.

Support for port-based Quality of Service enabling various application requirements for latency and SLA.

ConnectX-7 provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines within the server.

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

• NVMe over TCP acceleration

ConnectX-7 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.

• Collective operations offloads

• Vector collective operations offloads

• MPI tag matching

• MPI_Alltoall offloads

• Rendezvous protocol offload

330-370 million messages per second.

The secure boot process assures booting of authentic firmware/software that is intended to run on ConnectX-7. This is achieved using cryptographic primitives using asymmetric cryptography. ConnectX-7 supports several cryptographic functions in its HW Root-of-Trust (RoT) that has its key stored in on-chip FUSES.

The Secure firmware update feature enables a device to verify digital signatures of new firmware binaries to ensure that only officially approved versions can be installed from the host, the network, or a Board Management Controller (BMC). The firmware of devices with “secure firmware update” functionality (secure FW), restricts access to specific commands and registers that can be used to modify the firmware binary image on the flash, as well as commands that can jeopardize security in general.

For further information, refer to the MFT User Manual.

Block-level encryption and checksum offloads.

ConnectX-7 technology maintains support for host manageability through a BMC. ConnectX-7 PCIe stand-up adapter can be connected to a BMC using MCTP over SMBus or MCTP over PCIe protocols as if it is a standard NVIDIA PCIe stand-up adapter card. For configuring the adapter for the specific manageability solution in use by the server, please contact NVIDIA Support.

• Protocols: PLDM, NCSI

• Transport layer – RBT, MCTP over SMBus and MCTP over PCIe

• Physical layer: SMBus 2.0 / I2C interface for device control and configuration, PCIe

• PLDM for Monitor and Control DSP0248

• PLDM for Firmware Update DSP026

• IEEE 1149.6

• Secured FW update

• FW Recovery

• NIC reset

• Monitoring and control

• Network port settings

• Boot setting

NVIDIA offers a full IEEE 1588v2 PTP software solution, as well as time-sensitive related features called “5T”. NVIDIA PTP and 5T software solutions are designed to meet the most demanding PTP profiles. ConnectX-7 incorporates an integrated Hardware Clock (PHC) that allows ConnectX-7 to achieve sub 20u Sec accuracy and also offers many timing-related functions such as time-triggered scheduling or time-based SND accelerations (time-based ASAP²). Furthermore, 5T technology enables the software application to transmit fronthaul (ORAN) compatible in high bandwidth. The PTP part supports the subordinate clock, master clock, and boundary clock.

ConnectX-7 PTP solution allows you to run any PTP stack on your host.

With respect to testing and measurements, selected NVIDIA adapters allow you to use the PPS-out signal from the onboard SMA connecter, ConnectX-7 also allows measuring PTP in scale, with a PPS-In signal. The PTP HW clock on the Network adapter will be sampled on each PPS-In signal, and the timestamp will be sent to the SW.

ConnectX-7, utilizing IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technology, delivers low-latency and high-performance over InfiniBand and Ethernet networks. Leveraging datacenter bridging (DCB) capabilities as well as ConnectX-7 advanced congestion control hardware mechanisms, RoCE provides efficient low-latency RDMA services over Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks.

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-7 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.

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

• Flexible match-action flow tables

• Open VSwitch (OVS) offload using ASAP²®

• Tunneling encapsulation/decapsulation

Applies to MCX713114TC-GEAT only:

NVIDIA offers a full IEEE 1588v2 PTP software solution, as well as time-sensitive related features called “5T”. NVIDIA PTP and 5T software solutions are designed to meet the most demanding PTP profiles. ConnectX-6 Dx incorporates an integrated Hardware Clock (PHC) that allows ConnectX-7 to achieve sub 20u Sec accuracy and also offers many timing-related functions such as time-triggered scheduling or time-based SND accelerations (time-based ASAP²). Furthermore, 5T technology enables the software application to transmit fronthaul (ORAN) compatible in high bandwidth. The PTP part supports the subordinate clock, master clock, and boundary clock.

ConnectX-7 PTP solution allows you to run any PTP stack on your host. With respect to testing and measurements, selected NVIDIA adapters allow you to use the PPS-out signal from the onboard SMA connecter, ConnectX-7 also allows measuring PTP in scale, with PPS-In signal. The PTP HW clock on the Network adapter will be sampled on each PPS-In signal, and the timestamp will be sent to the SW. The SyncE cards also includes an improved holdover to meet ITU-T G.8273.2 class C.