ThinkSystem Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR/200GbE QSFP56 1-port PCIe 4 VPI Adapter

The ThinkSystem Mellanox ConnectX-6 HDR/200GbE VPI Adapters offer 200 Gb/s Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity for high-performance connectivity when running HPC, cloud, storage and machine learning applications.

Overview

The adapters have the following technical specifications.

Form factor

  • Single-slot low-profile main adapter (6.6-inch x 2.71 in.)
  • Single-slot low-profile auxilary adapter

PCI Express Interface

  • Supports PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 3.0
  • In PCIe 4.0 servers, the ConnectX-6 adapter is used by itself to connect 16 PCIe lanes. For two-socket servers, the adapter can be used with the Aux adapter to enable the Socket Direct feature.
  • In PCIe 3.0 servers, the ConnectX-6 adapter is used with the Aux adapter to connect 32 PCIe lanes. For two-socket servers, the adapter can be used with the Aux adapter to enable the Socket Direct feature.
  • PCIe Atomic
  • TLP (Transaction Layer Packet) Processing Hints (TPH)
  • PCIe switch Downstream Port Containment (DPC) enablement for PCIe hot-plug
  • Advanced Error Reporting (AER)
  • Access Control Service (ACS) for peer-to-peer secure communication
  • Process Address Space ID (PASID) Address Translation Services (ATS)
  • IBM CAPIv2 (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface)
  • Support for MSI/MSI-X mechanisms

Connectivity

  • One QSFP56 port
  • Supports passive copper cables with ESD protection
  • Powered connectors for optical and active cable support

InfiniBand

  • Supports interoperability with InfiniBand switches (up to HDR, as 4 lanes of 50Gb/s data rate)
  • Total connectivity is 200 Gb/s:
  • One port adapter supports a single 200 Gb/s link
  • HDR / HDR100 / EDR / FDR / QDR / DDR / SDR
  • IBTA Specification 1.3 compliant
  • RDMA, Send/Receive semantics
  • Hardware-based congestion control
  • Atomic operations
  • 16 million I/O channels
  • 256 to 4Kbyte MTU, 2Gbyte messages
  • 8 virtual lanes + VL15

Ethernet (requires firmware 20.28.1002 or later)

  • Support interoperability with Ethernet switches (up to 200GbE, as 4 lanes of 50Gb/s data rate)
  • Total connectivity is 200 Gb/s:
  • One port adapter supports a single 200 Gb/s link
  • Supports 200 GbE / 100GbE / 50GbE / 40GbE / 25GbE / 10GbE / 1GbE
  • IEEE 802.3bj, 802.3bm 100 Gigabit Ethernet
  • IEEE 802.3by, Ethernet Consortium 25, 50 Gigabit Ethernet, supporting all FEC modes
  • IEEE 802.3ba 40 Gigabit Ethernet
  • IEEE 802.3ae 10 Gigabit Ethernet
  • IEEE 802.3az Energy Efficient Ethernet
  • IEEE 802.3ap based auto-negotiation and KR startup
  • IEEE 802.3ad, 802.1AX Link Aggregation
  • IEEE 802.1Q, 802.1P VLAN tags and priority
  • IEEE 802.1Qau (QCN) – Congestion Notification
  • IEEE 802.1Qaz (ETS)
  • IEEE 802.1Qbb (PFC)
  • IEEE 802.1Qbg
  • IEEE 1588v2
  • Jumbo frame support (9.6KB)
  • IPv4 (RFQ 791)
  • IPv6 (RFC 2460)

Enhanced Features

  • Hardware-based reliable transport
  • Collective operations offloads
  • Vector collective operations offloads
  • PeerDirect RDMA (GPUDirect) communication acceleration
  • 64/66 encoding
  • Enhanced Atomic operations
  • Advanced memory mapping support, allowing user mode registration and remapping of memory (UMR)
  • Extended Reliable Connected transport (XRC)
  • Dynamically Connected transport (DCT)
  • On demand paging (ODP)
  • MPI Tag Matching
  • Rendezvous protocol offload
  • Out-of-order RDMA supporting Adaptive Routing
  • Burst buffer offload
  • In-Network Memory registration-free RDMA memory access

CPU Offloads

  • RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)
  • TCP/UDP/IP stateless offload
  • LSO, LRO, checksum offload
  • RSS (also on encapsulated packet), TSS, HDS, VLAN and MPLS tag insertion/stripping, Receive flow steering
  • Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) for kernel bypass applications
  • Open VSwitch (OVS) offload using ASAP2
  • Flexible match-action flow tables
  • Tunneling encapsulation / de-capsulation
  • Intelligent interrupt coalescence
  • Header rewrite supporting hardware offload of NAT router

Storage Offloads

  • Block-level encryption: XTS-AES 256/512 bit key
  • NVMe over Fabric offloads for target machine
  • Erasure Coding offload - offloading Reed-Solomon calculations
  • T10 DIF - signature handover operation at wire speed, for ingress and egress traffic
  • Storage Protocols: SRP, iSER, NFS RDMA, SMB Direct, NVMe-oF

Overlay Networks

  • RoCE over overlay networks
  • Stateless offloads for overlay network tunneling protocols
  • Hardware offload of encapsulation and decapsulation of VXLAN, NVGRE, and GENEVE overlay networks

Hardware-Based I/O Virtualization

  • Single Root IOV
  • Address translation and protection
  • VMware NetQueue support
  • SR-IOV: Up to 512 Virtual Functions
  • SR-IOV: Up to 16 Physical Functions per host
  • Virtualization hierarchies (network partitioning, NPAR)
  • Virtualizing Physical Functions on a physical port
  • SR-IOV on every Physical Function
  • Configurable and user-programmable QoS
  • Guaranteed QoS for VMs

HPC Software Libraries

  • HPC-X, OpenMPI, MVAPICH, MPICH, OpenSHMEM, PGAS and varied commercial packages

Management and Control

  • NC-SI, MCTP over SMBus and MCTP over PCIe - BMC interface
  • PLDM for Monitor and Control DSP0248
  • PLDM for Firmware Update DSP0267
  • SDN management interface for managing the eSwitch
  • I2C interface for device control and configuration
  • General Purpose I/O pins
  • SPI interface to Flash
  • JTAG IEEE 1149.1 and IEEE 1149.6

Remote Boot

  • Remote boot over InfiniBand
  • Remote boot over Ethernet
  • Remote boot over iSCSI
  • Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)
  • Pre-execution Environment (PXE)

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