InfiniBand Overview

In 1999, seven companies (Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems) joined together to form the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA). The IBTA s purpose is to develop a new common I/O specification to deliver a channel-based, switched fabric approach to I/O technology that the entire industry can adopt. ^[1]

The IBTA released version 1.0 of the InfiniBand Architecture Specification in October, 2000. This specification is quite comprehensive. It includes the electrical and mechanical configurations of IBA physical media, the format of packets carried over the media, the set of operations and semantics supported, and a management interface. Not included in the specification is an API. Rather, the specification defines a set of verbs that provide an abstract description of the function of an IBA NIC (Host Channel Adapter in IBA terms).
[1] Reference to IBA specification.

IBA includes many concepts of the VI Architecture. These include: Remote-DMA capability, user level access to the hardware, and a work queue model. There is even an implementation of VIPL for IBA.

Readers wanting more information on IBA can read InfiniBand Architecture Deployment and Development, A Strategic Guide to Server I/O Solutions from Intel Press.

Differences Between VIA and IBA

IBA is not simply an implementation...