What problem does the InfiniBand I/O architecture address?
Thomas Bradicich: The industry standard I/O architecture today is called PCI. That technology has served us well. It’s about nine years old, but it’s what’s called a bus architecture. A bus architecture has genetic compromises in it, in terms of reliability, scalability, and performance. Several decades ago, my forefathers at IBM solved this problem with an architecture called a channel I/O, as opposed to a bus I/O. If you use the analogy of an interstate highway carrying people versus a train track carrying people, you can see the advantages. If one train wrecks, it doesn’t affect the other trains. One can add more train tracks without affecting the other trains. Think of a channel I/O as a point-to-point connection, much like a train track. However, an industry standard way to do channel architectures did not exist prior to InfiniBand. NA: So how would this architecture benefit clustering, for example? TB: Clustering would be one but not the only application. I have extremely high re
