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About the HCA Drivers
HCA Package Contents
Inspect all items for shipping damage. If anything appears to be damaged, or if you encounter problems
when installing or configuring your system, contact a customer service representative.
The HP Dual-port 4x Fabric Adapters ship with the following components:
•
One HP Dual-port 4x Fabric Adapter
•
HP Dual-port 4x Fabric Adapter Quick Setup Instructions
•
Limited Warranty and Material Limitations Documentation
The HP Dual-port 4x Fabric Adapters provide a full suite of upper-layer protocols, including IPoIB,
SDP, SRP, MPI and uDAPL.
IPoIB
IPoIB is a required protocol; it allows the IP network to utilize the InfiniBand fabric. It is used by SDP
and uDAPL to resolve IP addresses. IPoIB is configured like a normal Ethernet interface. During the
installation process, ib interface names are automatically added to the network configuration. These
correspond to the ports on the HCA.
Socket Direct Protocol (SDP)
The Socket Direct Protocol (SDP) is a high-performance, zero-copy data-transfer protocol used for
stream-socket networking over an InfiniBand fabric. The driver can be configured to automatically
translate TCP to SDP based on source IP, destination, or program name.
uDAPL
The User Direct Access Programming Library (uDAPL) defines a set of APIs that exploits RDMA
capabilities. uDAPL is installed transparently with the driver library. Your application must explicitly
support uDAPL. uDAPL is transparently installed and requires no further configuration. However, if
your application supports uDAPL, it may require additional configuration changes. Please refer to your
application documentation for more information.
SCSI RDMA (SRP)
The SCSCI RDMA (SRP) protocol runs SCSI commands across RDMA-capable networks for
InfiniBand hosts to communicate with Fibre Channel storage devices. This information is used to assign
devices and mount file-systems so that the data on those file-systems is accessible to the host.
The SRP driver is installed as part of the driver package, and is loaded automatically upon host reboot.
Use of this protocol requires that a Fibre Channel gateway be present in the chassis.
MPI
The MPI protocol is bundled with the Upper Layer Protocol (ULP) suite. Topspin has taken the Ohio
State University's (OSU's) MVAPICH and created Topspin's version of this release. However, in
addition, the HCAs also run using other popular InfiniBand MPI implementations.
Alternative MPI Implementations
Topspin customers have also deployed a variety of MPIs that use Mellanox's VAPI layer. This includes
OSU, LAM-MPI, Verari Systems Software, Inc's MPI/Pro (formerly Softech's ), and LANL MPI.
Topspin products have also been used successfully with SCALI MPI, which is based on uDAPL.
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