2014 has already proved to be a busy year for the IBTA. The organization is currently in the midst of compiling results from the recent Plugfest 24, which took place this past October at the University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Laboratory.
IBTA SC13 Demonstration
While exhibiting at SC13 in November, we had the opportunity to showcase the IBTA’s newest EDR 100Gb/s compliance and interoperability testing capabilities that were implemented during October’s biannual Plugfest event. Due to the popularity of the demo at the conference, we wanted to share some details and results here on our blog.
The IBTA’s sophisticated test set-up leveraged Anritsu generators and Tektronix scopes to test EDR active cables. The Anritsu generators were used to generate a spec compliant 25Gb/s input signal to one lane of an active optical cable along with 25Gb/s signals to the other 7 lanes which were being used as “aggressor” lanes. Tektronix provided a scope capable of testing the 25Gb/s per lane output of the EDR active cables. The details are provided in the Anritsu Method of Implementation (MOI) which is available here.
The significance of this testing, is that we were able to not only achieve 25Gb/s speed per lane (100Gb/s total over 4 lanes), but we were also able to analyze data at that speed. The IBTA currently has both copper and active optical cables running at 100Gb/s that are also compliant with the latest InfiniBand specifications.
3M Company, Advanced Photonics, Inc, Amphenol, FCI, Finisar, Foxconn, Fujikura Ltd., Hitachi Cable America, Lorom Industrial, Mellanox, Molex, Samtec, Sumitomo, TE Connectivity and Volex attended PlugFest 24 and tested a total of 189 cables for both compliance and interoperability.
Intel, Mellanox and NetApp also tested a total of 17 devices including InfiniBand to Ethernet Gateways, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs), Switches and SRP Targets. These end points and switches provided the foundation for running approximately 1000 interoperability tests using the Open MPI test benchmark and the interconnects provided by the cable vendors listed above.
Anritsu InfiniBand ATD EDR Test Solution
Agilent, Anritsu, Tektronix and Wilder Technologies all provided the latest generation of Test equipment needed to test 100Gb/s InfiniBand EDR cables. The IBTA PlugFest provides a great opportunity for all these companies to work together to improve InfiniBand and to ensure that the products are both robust and interoperable.
IBTA’s Plugfest events take place twice per year, during which the IBTA tests compliance with the InfiniBand architecture specification and interoperability with other InfiniBand products. The IBTA Plugfest 24 Integrators’ List has been released and features vendor devices and cables that successfully passed all required Integrators’ List compliance tests and interoperability procedures during Plugfest 24.
The IBTA Integrators’ List contains a list of compliant and interoperable products and is available here.
For more information on the upcoming IBTA Plugfest being held in April 2014 check out the Plugfest website.