[openib-general] Re: how to choose appropriate ULPs for application

[Philippe Bernadat]

Lustre does support infiniband. 
This is implemented as a specific NAL kernel module.

HP has just announced a new release of SFS that supports 
the Voltaire stack: 
http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2005/050621a.html
HP SFS is based on Lustre Technology:
http://www.hp.com/techservers/products/sfs.html

As explained in the Lustre FAQ, this is not an OpenIB NAL:



    When and how will you support InfiniBand?

The reality of InfiniBand today is, unfortunately, a world of three IB 
driver stacks, which effectively means individual support for three 
separate interconnects: the Mellanox/TopSpin/OpenIB-1 stack, the 
InfiniCon stack, and the Voltaire stack.

We have existing network abstraction layers (NALs) for all three, with 
varying degress of performance and stability. Customers are now 
beginning to appear for all three, and we will begin to introduce stable 
and performant versions of these NALs into the Lustre 1.4.x series.

It is anticipated that all three will be ready for production 
deployments on clusters of many hundreds of nodes in the first half of 2005.

When the promised vision of a single, usable, vendor-supported OpenIB 
Generation 2 driver stack becomes available, we will transition to a 
single OpenIB NAL.

Wang Xigui wrote:/

> Thank you very much!
> I'll read the materials that you supply.
>
>     I have not described my plan clearly. I don't konw how to run lustre
> on IB. Neither do I konw the lustre running in kernel space or user
> space. Now the lustre NAL does not supports IB vapi. If I use IPoIB,
> it works. But it doen not take take advantage of RDMA. Supporse
> lustre NAL invoke SDP or uDAP, RDMA is enable.
>
>    Invocation of Verb API to realize lustre NAL is my target. The SDP or
> uDAP is first step.
/

>/ Hello
/>/
/>/     We plan to run lustre on InfiniBand. But now lustre does not support
/>/ IB.
/>/ I know noting about the IB stack. So I think the IB Upper Layer
/>/ Protocol(SDP, DAP) could be used to transport data for lustre.
/>/ 	But there are too many ULPs over IB. I know little about them. As far as
/>/ I konw, iSER/SRP is for SCSI command transportation. So, it seems both
/>/ SDP and uDAP are OK for my plan. I cant tell the difference between them.
/>/ Which one is better, SDP or DAP? I don't konw how to choose?
/>/
/>/ 	Any suggestion is appreciated!
/>