InfiniBand News

April 1, 2002

InfiniBand Everywhere—Sky Computers has so much confidence in InfiniBand that its next generation of systems will use InfiniBand on the backplane. The new systems will be based on IBM's InfiniBand 4X Host Channel Adapter (HCA). The...

William G. Wong

InfiniBand Everywhere—Sky Computers has so much confidence in InfiniBand that its next generation of systems will use InfiniBand on the backplane. The new systems will be based on IBM's InfiniBand 4X Host Channel Adapter (HCA). The technology is designed to replace existing interconnects like Sky Computers' SkyChannel, a proprietary, parallel switched interconnect. Local InfiniBand clusters will handle four processors with systems growing to more than 256 processors. Systems will utilize in-band configuration and error management. Sky Computers promises extensive Linux support on this platform. www.skycomputers.com

InfiniBand Gets Real In 2002—The InfiniBand 1.0 specification will be a year old in June, just as the floodgates for shipping InfiniBand products begin to open. To date, InfiniBand products have been limited to chips and evaluation systems. Companies such as QLogic (www.qlogic.com), InfiniSwitch (www.infiniswitch.com), JNI Corp. (www.jni.com), and Mellonax Technologies (www.mellonax.com) will deliver InfiniBand switch and router support.

Channel Conflict—From Vieo Inc. (www.vieo.com), the Channel Abstraction Layer (CAL) and Lane15 Software's (www.lane15.com) Channel Interface application programming interfaces (APIs) appear to address the same problem—interfacing InfiniBand applications with InfiniBand hardware. The conflict arises because the InfiniBand specification spells out verb (actions that can be performed) definitions but leaves the API up to the vendors. Pick your winner.

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.