A new strategy to manage the InfiniBand arbitration tables

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is an industry-standard architecture for server I/O and interprocessor communication. InfiniBand is extensively used for interconnection in high-performance clusters. It has been developed by the InfiniBand(SM) Trade Association (IBTA) to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS). necessary for present and future server systems. The provision of QoS in data communication networks is currently the focus of much discussion and research in both industry and academia. In that sense. IBA enables QoS support with some mechanisms. In this paper, we examine these mechanisms and describe a way to use them. We propose a traffic segregation strategy based only on delay requirements. Moreover, we propose a very effective methodology to compute the virtual lane arbitration tables. Finally, we evaluate our proposal and performance results show that, with a correct traffic treatment at the output ports, every traffic class meets its QoS requirements. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.