Intelligent RDMA-enabled network adapter card with advanced application offload capabilities supporting 100Gb/s for servers without x16 PCIe slots
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.
SOCKET DIRECT
ConnectX-5 Socket Direct provides 100Gb/s port speed even to servers without x16 PCIe slots by splitting the 16-lane PCIe bus into two 8-lane buses, one of which is accessible through a PCIe x8 edge connector and the other through a parallel x8 Auxiliary PCIe Connection Card, connected by a dedicated harness.
Moreover, the card brings improved performance to dual-socket servers by enabling direct access from each CPU in a dual-socket server to the network through its dedicated PCIe x8 interface. In such a configuration, Socket Direct also brings lower latency and lower CPU utilization. The direct connection from each CPU to
the network means the Interconnect can bypass a QPI (UPI) and the other CPU, optimizing performance and improving latency. CPU utilization is improved as each CPU handles only its own traffic and not traffic from the other CPU.
Socket Direct also enables 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.
Mellanox Multi-Host technology, which was first introduced with ConnectX-4, is enabled in the Mellanox Socket Direct card, allowing multiple hosts to be connected into a single adapter by separating the PCIe interface into multiple and independent interfaces.
