Mellanox MCX556M-ECAT-S25 CONNECTX-5 VPI Adapter Card

Connectx-5 Infiniband Adapter Card

ConnectX-5 VPI Socket Direct EDR IB and 100GbE InfiniBand & Ethernet Adapter Card

Intelligent RDMA-enabled network adapter card with advanced application offload capabilities supporting 100Gb/s for servers without x16 PCIe slots.

Benefits:

• Up to 100Gb/s connectivity per port

• Industry-leading throughput, low latency, low CPU utilization and high message rate

• Low latency for dual-socket servers in environments with multiple network flows

• Innovative rack design for storage and Machine Learning based on Host Chaining technology

• Smart interconnect for x86, Power, Arm, and GPU-based compute and storage platforms

• Advanced storage capabilities including NVMe over Fabric offloads

• Intelligent network adapter supporting flexible pipeline programmability

• Cutting-edge performance in virtualized networks including Network Function Virtualization (NFV)

• Enabler for efficient service chaining capabilities

• Efficient I/O consolidation, lowering data center costs and complexity

ConnectX-5 Socket Direct with Virtual Protocol Interconnect supports two ports of 100Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet connectivity, very low latency, and very high message rate, OVS and NVMe over Fabric offloads, providing the highest performance and most flexible solution for the most demanding applications and markets: Machine Learning, Data Analytics, and more.

Features:

• Socket Direct, enabling 100Gb/s for servers without x16 PCIe slots

• Tag matching and rendezvous offloads

• Adaptive routing on reliable transport

• Burst buffer offloads for background checkpointing

• NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) offloads

• Back-end switch elimination by host chaining

• Enhanced vSwitch/vRouter offloads

• Flexible pipeline

• RoCE for overlay networks

• RoHS compliant

• ODCC compatible

HPC Environments

ConnectX-5 offers enhancements to HPC infrastructures by providing MPI and SHMEM/ PGAS and rendezvous tag matching offload, hardware support for out-of-order RDMA write and read operations, as well as additional network atomic and PCIe atomic operations support.

ConnectX-5 enhances RDMA network capabilities by completing the switch adaptive- routing capabilities and supporting data delivered out-of-order, while maintaining ordered completion semantics, providing multipath reliability, and efficient support for all network topologies, including DragonFly and DragonFly+.

ConnectX-5 also supports burst buffer offload for background checkpointing without interfering in the main CPU operations, and the innovative dynamic connected transport (DCT) service to ensure extreme scalability for compute and storage systems.

Storage Environments

NVMe storage devices are gaining popularity, offering very fast storage access. The NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) protocol leverages RDMA connectivity for remote access. ConnectX-5 offers further enhancements by providing NVMe-oF target offloads, enabling highly efficient NVMe storage access with no CPU intervention, and thus improved performance and lower latency.

Standard block and file access protocols can leverage RDMA for high-performance storage access. A consolidated compute and storage network achieves significant cost- performance advantages over multi-fabric networks.

Adapter Card Portfolio

ConnectX-5 InfiniBand adapter cards are available in several form factors, including low- profile stand-up PCIe, Open Compute Project (OCP) Spec 2.0 Type 1, and OCP 2.0 Type 2.

NVIDIA Multi-Host technology allows multiple hosts to be connected into a single adapter by separating the PCIe interface into multiple and independent interfaces.

The portfolio also offers NVIDIA Socket Direct configurations that enable servers without x16 PCIe slots to split the card’s 16-lane PCIe bus into two 8-lane buses on dedicated cards connected by a harness. This provides 100Gb/s port speed even to servers without a x16 PCIe slot.

Socket Direct also enables NVIDIA GPUDirect® RDMA for all CPU/GPU pairs by ensuring that all GPUs are linked to CPUs close to the adapter card, and enables Intel® DDIO on both sockets by creating a direct connection between the sockets and the adapter card.

Full specification and details can be found in the Product Datasheet PDF file