Embedded InfiniBand

InfiniBand has been receiving a significant amount of press recently. Its performance, reliability, availability, serviceability, and manageability at a modest cost will make it an excellent technology for use in the computer room—its initial design target. These same capabilities are required in a number of embedded applications, and InfiniBand may actually see many of its initial success stories there rather than in the computer room.

In the embedded space, VME and cPCI have been used for years to build systems. Because of the performance limitations of these two busses, parallel switched interconnects such as SKYchannel and RACEway were created. These busses can't realistically go any faster. Today's serial interconnects such as InfiniBand provide performance increases and functionality enhancements not possible with a parallel interconnect, while simultaneously reducing cost.