An Introduction to the InfiniBand Architecture

The InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) is a new industry-standard architecture for server I/O and inter-server communication. It was developed by the InfiniBandSM Trade Association (IBTA) to provide the levels of reliability, availability, performance, and scalability necessary for present and future server systems, levels significantly better than can be achieved with bus-oriented I/O structures. This chapter provides a description of the reason IBA was developed, an brief overview of the architecture as a whole, more detailed information about several selected IBA topics, and discussion of industry implications of this architecture.