MIBA: A Micro-Benchmark Suite for Evaluating InfiniBand Architecture Implementations

Recently, InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) has been proposed as the next generation interconnect for I/O and inter-process communication. The main idea behind this industry standard is to use a scalable switched fabric to design the next generation clusters and servers with high performance and scalability. This architecture provides various types of new mechanisms and services (such as multiple transport services, RDMA and atomic operations, multicast support, service levels, and virtual channels). These services are provided by components (such as queue pairs, completion queue, and virtual-to-physical address translations) and their attributes. Different implementation choices of IBA may lead to different design strategies for efficient implementation of higher level communication layer/libraries (such as Message Passing Interface (MPI), sockets, and distributed shared memory). It also has an impact on the performance of applications.

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