InfiniBand performace

[brundibar]

Hello,

we are using InfiniBand Cisco products SFP700P-SK9 switch and adapters SFP-HE4XCI2-LSM1 together with Sun Fire X2100 M2 servers equipped with

dual-core Opteron processor. We are using our cluster mainly fro HPC. I have simple question. If we run two processes parallel on one processor each process ha its CPU-core and both work simultaneously. If they want to perform communication operation over InfiniBand in the same time how this kind of operation is handled? Can both processes communicate together or only by one-by-one approach?

We are planning to make upgrade of our servers to Sun Fire X2200 M2 and equipped them by 2 dual-core Opteron processors. We afraid of communication bottleneck if 4 parallel processes (threads) want to communicate in the same time. Does it help to equip server with two InfiniBand adapters? Is it possible to slit communication load between two adapters?

Thanks for any info.

Michal

[dsweeny]

The CPU informs the DMA hardware of the memory location where data that is associated with a particular process resides and the memory location the data is to be moved to. Once the DMA instructions are sent, the CPU can process other threads while the DMA hardware moves the data.Refer URL

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat3560/12225see/scg/swsnmp.htm