ConnectX-5 is a high-performance network adapter from NVIDIA, originally under the Mellanox brand. Here’s a closer look at ConnectX-5:
ConnectX-5 Main Features
Port Speed
The ConnectX-5 offers a variety of port speed options, including 2x100Gb/s, 1x100Gb/s, and more, to meet the needs of different application scenarios.
Message Rate
With a processing capacity of up to 148 million messages per second, it ensures efficient data transmission in the network.
PCIe Lanes
Supports 2nd/3rd generation PCIe channels and provides high-speed data transmission channels.
NVIDIA RoCE Technology
It encapsulates data packets for transmission over Ethernet, effectively reducing the CPU load. This provides a high-bandwidth and low-latency network infrastructure, which is ideal for network and storage-intensive applications.
NVIDIA ASAP² Technology
Provides innovative SR-IOV and VirtIO acceleration for extreme performance and scalability by offloading the open vSwitch data path from the host CPU to the NIC.
Storage Acceleration
The system supports NVMe over Fabric (NVMf) target offload, thereby providing higher performance and lower latency for storage applications.
Virtualization Support
Supports SR-IOV technology to separate access to physical resources and functions in a virtualized environment, reduce I/O overhead, and maintain near-non-virtualized performance.
ConnectX-5 Technical Highlights
RDMA and RoCE Technologies
Leverage both IBTA RDMA (Remote Data Memory Access) and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) technologies to deliver low latency and high performance.
PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 Standards are Supported
It is the first adapter to be compatible with both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 standards, delivering up to 200Gb/s total throughput for PCIe 4.0 standards and system.
ASAP2 Technology
The load function of the Open V-Switch (OVS) virtual switching software has been enhanced, which can greatly improve data transfer performance while avoiding CPU overload.
NVMe Storage Acceleration
Further enhancements are achieved by the provision of NVMf target offload, which allows for very efficient NVMe storage access without CPU intervention. This results in improved performance and lower latency.
ConnectX-5 Compatibility
The ConnectX-5 is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, servers, and storage devices. At the same time, it supports a variety of network interface types, including Ethernet and InfiniBand. Additionally, it ensures efficient operation in different application scenarios by supporting various protocols.
In summary, the ConnectX-5 is a high-performance, high-flexibility network adapter for a variety of application scenarios such as data centers, cloud computing, high-performance computing, and storage platforms.
