Mellanox ConnectX-5: 100Gb IB and Ethernet Smart Interconnect Adapter

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced ConnectX-5, an advanced 10, 25, 40, 50, 56 and 100Gb/s IB and Ethernet intelligent adapter.

ConnectX-5 introduces smart offloading engines that enable the highest application performance while maximizing data center ROI. Furthermore, It is the first PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 compatible adapter, enabling greater flexibility and future-proofing for the data center.

With the exponential growth of data and the increase in businesses that takes advantage of real-time data processing for HPC, data analytics, machine learning, national security and IoT applications, the market needs the fastest interconnect available, and also interconnect intelligence that can perform data algorithms as the data moves throughout the data center.

The intelligent ConnectX-5 100G adapter enables the most advanced real-time in network computing engines to unleash business opportunities and new technological developments.

“The new ConnectX-5 100G adapter further enables high performance, data analytics, deep learning, storage, Web 2.0 and more applications to perform data-related algorithms on the network to achieve the highest system performance and utilization,” said Gilad Shainer, VP, marketing, Mellanox. “Today, scalable computer and storage systems suffer from data bottlenecks that limit research, product development, and constrain application services. ConnectX-5 will help unleash business potential with faster, more effective, real-time data processing and analytics. With its smart offloading, ConnectX-5 will enable dramatic increases in CPU, GPU and FPGA performance that will enhance effectiveness and maximize the return on data centers’ investment.“

ConnectX-5 enables greater HPC performance with new Message Passing Interface (MPI) offloads, such as MPI Tag Matching and MPI AlltoAll operations, advanced dynamic routing, and new capabilities to perform various data algorithms. ConnectX-5 delivers the highest available message rate of 200 million messages per second, which is 33% higher than the ConnectX-4 adapter and nearly 2X compared to competitive products.

ConnectX-5 is the first interconnect adapter to support PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 connectivity options, and includes an integrated PCIe switch. For upcoming PCIe 4.0 enabled systems, it will deliver an aggregated throughput of 200Gb/s.

The ConnectX-5 Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing (ASAP2) technology enhances Open V-Switch (OVS) offloading, which results in higher data transfer performance without overloading the CPU. Together with native RDMA and RoCE support, ConnectX-5 will improve cloud and NFV platform efficiency.

For storage infrastructures, ConnectX-5 introduces acceleration engines for NVM Express (NVMe). NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) enables end-users to connect remote subsystems with flash appliances, leveraging RDMA technology to achieve faster application response times and better scalability across virtual data centers. Storage applications will see improved performance and lower latency with the advanced NVMf target offloads that ConnectX-5 delivers.

“IDC research continues to show that IB is a network of choice for the world’s fastest HPCs. Indeed, in a recent IDC study, 30% of HPC users surveyed indicated that IB was the interconnect used in their fastest HPC,” said Bob Sorensen, VP, research, IDC. “Demands for growing HPC performance dictate that more efficient, capable, and intelligent networks will soon be needed to help manage the complex flow of data within a processor/storage fabric, relieve the computational processors from the overheard of data communications housekeeping, and add additional processing and network dataflow support within the network where and when it is needed. Mellanox is taking the first critical steps in formulating and realizing that vision, and the company is signaling that it will remain committed to adding new and higher performance functionality to its smart interconnect product lines.“

“With the move to off-premise cloud services and adoption of hybrid cloud architectures, enterprises have access to more data and new data analytics possibilities, and we expect to see a significant increase in adoption by organizations looking to do more with their data,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director, data center, cloud, and SDN, IHS Technology. “There is now a clear growing need for more data processing to be accomplished within the network in order to achieve the performance levels required by artificial intelligence, machine learning and the IoT algorithms. Mellanox’s ConnectX-5 features in-network computing capability, which allows algorthms and other tasks to be offloaded from server CPUs, and thus making requisite performance levels possible, is an important advancement for the market.“

“The rapid expansion of data makes it imperative that the data moves both as fast as possible and as little as possible, or else it can overwhelm a network,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research, Inc. “Having a high-bandwidth network that is also intelligent and can offload data algorithms, as well as network-related tasks, keeps the rest of the system running efficiently without the network becoming a bottleneck. In-network computing makes applications run faster, which means quicker analysis and time to discovery.“

“Dell and Mellanox are long-time partners, delivering Dell HPC Systems utilizing Mellanox IB, including the recently announced one petaflops system at the Center for HPC in South Africa,” said Jim Ganthier, VP and GM, engineered solutions, HPC and cloud, Dell, Inc. “With the announcement of Connect-X5, Mellanox is raising the bar, accelerating HPC performance and results and enabling new levels of innovation for our mutual customers.“

“To succeed in today’s increasingly competitive market, organizations must harness the latest advancements in compute and interconnect fabric technologies to fuel new applications and extract profit-making insight from their data,” said Scott Misage, VP and GM, HPC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Our industry-leading compute platforms, combined with Mellanox’s intelligent ConnectX-5 adapters, can provide customers a significant boost in real-time data processing, improve analytics and usher in a new wave of innovation.“

“IBM and the OpenPOWER Foundation are deeply committed to acceleration technologies as they represent a critical piece of the new HPC designs emerging today,” said Sumit Gupta, VP, HPC and data analytics, IBM Corp. “Mellanox’s ConnectX-5 technology continues to push the envelope to maximize system throughput for HPC, deep learning, and data analytics applications.“

“Bringing more value to HPC and the data center is what ConnectX-5 is all about,” noted Mr. Leijun Hu, VP, Inspur Group Co. Ltd. “We believe Mellanox’s innovative product will drive application performance to new levels and vastly improve ROI in the data center.“

“With the advent of high performance applications like Machine Learning and real-time analytics, data center customers are looking for technologies that have the underpinnings to support next-generation workloads. EDR gave us a great jump in bandwidth, and now Mellanox adds a substantial boost in message rates with ConnectX-5,” said Martin W. Hiegl, WW sales leader, HPC, at Lenovo Enterprise Solutions, Pte Ltd.

“SGI continuously focuses on delivering application performance to our HPC users. With our partnership with Mellanox we continue to drive application performance at scale with increasingly larger data workloads,” said Gabriel Broner, VP and GM, HPC, SGI Corp. “The ConnectX-5 technology with increased message rates enables us to deliver overall increased system and application performance, offering real and tangible value to our customers.“

“Future proofing the data center is essential to our success and we are pleased to see Mellanox introduce a product aimed at achieving just that,” said Mr. Chaoqun Sha, SVP, product and technology, Sugon Information Industry Co., Ltd. “This new technology will enable new levels of interconnect speed while deploying deep interconnect intelligence that lays the foundation for a new era of HPC solutions.“

InfiniBand/VPI Cards – ConnectX-5
InfiniBand/VPI Adapters – ConnectX-5
Ethernet Cards – ConnectX-5 EN