Introduction

PCI Express Slot

In PCIe x16 Configuration

PCIe Gen6 @ 64GT/s through x16 edge connector

System Power Supply

Refer to Specifications

Operating System

• In-box drivers for major operating systems:

  • Linux: RHEL, Ubuntu

  • Windows

• DOCA Host

• OpenFabrics Windows Distribution (WinOF-2)

Connectivity

• Interoperable with 25/100/200/400 Gb/s Ethernet switches and SDR/EDR/HDR100/HDR/NDR/XDR InfiniBand switches

• Passive copper cable with ESD protection

• Powered connectors for optical and active cable support

Cards

1

ConnectX-8 SuperNIC for OCP 3.0

Accessories

1

Thumbscrew (Pull Tab) or Internal Lock Bracket

PCI Express (PCIe)

• PCIe x16 configurations:

  PCIe Gen6 (64GT/s) through x16 edge connector

InfiniBand Architecture Specification v1.7 compliant

ConnectX-8 delivers low latency, high bandwidth, and computing efficiency for high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), and hyperscale cloud data center applications. ConnectX-8 is InfiniBand Architecture Specification v1.7 compliant.

InfiniBand Network Protocols and Rates

Up to 400 Gigabit Ethernet

ConnectX-8 SuperNICs comply with the following IEEE 802.3 standards:

400GbE / 200GbE / 100GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE

Memory Components

• SPI - includes 512Mbit SPI Quad Flash device.

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

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-8 effectively addresses this by providing advanced NVGRE and VXLAN hardware offloading engines that encapsulate and de-capsulate the overlay protocol.

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-8 provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines within the server.

SR-IOV

ConnectX-8 SR-IOV technology provides dedicated adapter resources and guaranteed isolation and protection for virtual machines (VM) within the server.

High-Performance Accelerations

• Vector collective operations offload

• MPI_Alltoall offloads

• Rendezvous protocol offload

Secure Boot

The secure boot process assures the booting of authentic firmware/software that is intended to run on ConnectX-8. This is achieved using cryptographic primitives using asymmetric cryptography. ConnectX-8 supports several cryptographic functions in its HW Root-of-Trust (RoT) that has its key stored in on-chip FUSES.

Secure Firmware Update

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.

Host Management

ConnectX-8 technology maintains support for host manageability through a BMC. ConnectX-8 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 SuperNIC. 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

RDMA and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)

ConnectX-8, 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-8 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-8 advanced acceleration technology enables higher cluster efficiency and scalability to tens of thousands of nodes.

CPU Offload

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

Cryptography Accelerations

ConnectX-8 supports IPSec, MACSec, and PSP cryptography acceleration. Connectx-8 SuperNIC hardware-based accelerations offload the crypto operations and free up the CPU, reducing latency and enabling scalable crypto solutions.

NVIDIA Multi-Host

NVIDIA® Multi-Host technology enables next-generation Cloud, Web 2.0 and high-performance data centers to design and build new scale-out heterogeneous compute and storage racks with direct connectivity between multiple hosts and the centralized network controller. This enables direct data access with the lowest latency to significantly improve densities and maximizes data transfer rates. For more information, please visit NVIDIA Multi-Host Solutions.