[openib-general] IB: I don't like what I'm seeing.

Wed Mar 31 17:47:06 PST 2004

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 12:58:08PM -0700, ron minnich wrote:
> we don't believe in HCA reliability here. It has not worked once in all 
> the years of delivered networks. We're going to assume, unless we can see 
> BER of 10-21 app-to-app, that the network is unreliable. So, yes, toss and 
> start over is not inconceivable.
> 
> On the other hand, if we do get a perfect network, app to app, nobody's 
> going to complain, but until we see it at scale 1024+, I am not sure we 
> can really count on it. 
> 
> Sorry if I upset anyone on this list with my comments -- forgot it was 
> this open and it was early morning. But the code still worries me.

This is open-source, peer review development, if nobody is getting upset
we're not doing it right ;)

This is the first mention of bit error rates I've seen in an infiniband
discussion. Does anyone have end-to-end BER numbers for any deployed 
infiniband installations?

There is going to be a nasty tradeoff between BER and performance that I
really don't think the vendors have thought about much yet.

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