Learn About InfiniBand

InfiniBand is an industry standard architecture for server I/O and communications among servers. InfiniBand is designed to be scalable across a wide range of requirements, but is most widely used in high-performance computing environments. The InfiniBand standard includes definitions for physical interfaces and connectors as well as a protocol stack.

An InfiniBand network consists of one or more subnets. A subnet comprises endnodes (such as hosts and devices), switches, links, and a subnet manager.

The host interface for InfiniBand communications is called a host channel adapter (HCA). This terminology distinguishes HCAs from the host bus adapter (HBAs) used for Fibre Channel because InfiniBand is a point-to-point architecture rather than a bus architecture.