An Analysis of the Pathscale Inc. InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter, InfiniPath

The use of the InfiniBand Network Architecture (IB) in high performance computing (HPC) is a growing market. Several HPC vendors are offering IB as a high-speed message passing interconnect option in their product line today and it is anticipated that the number of installations will continue to grow over the next decade. At this time, it’s predominately being used in capacity type systems. Its use in higher end capability systems is limited at this time, primarily due to the immaturity of the system software and inherent scalability limitations. Pathscale Inc. is addressing some of the key scalability issues, low-latency, message throughput and connectionless based protocols in its InfiniPath product. This report evaluates the performance of the InfiniPath product by analyzing message passing microbenchmarks, Sandia Applications, and comparison to other systems using alternative high performance messaging interconnects.