Must Mellanox InfiniBand NICs work with Mellanox InfiniBand switch?

Infrastructure & Networking Software And Drivers Mellanox OFED
1

Hi, I am new to RDMA. My lab would like to deploy an RDMA system for experiments. I am wondering, to work with InfiniBand, should I buy an InfiniBand switch in addition to some InfiniBand NICs? Or if I can connect these InfiniBand NICs via some other ordinary switches? Will this deployment have some different effects on RDMA performance?

Many thanks for the help.

2

Hi,

To work with InfiniBand, you can either:

  1. Connect the servers back-to-back (no switch involved) and enable opensm on one of them.
  2. Use an InfiniBand switch, as 3rd party switches cannot be used for InfinibBand.

Regards,
Chen