Unfortunately, the 4036E only has two 10G Ethernet ports which will ultimately 
limit the throughput.  

The Mellanox BridgeX looks a better hardware solution with 12x 10Ge ports but 
when I tested this they could only provide vNIC functionality and would not 
commit to adding IPoIB gateway on their roadmap.  

Qlogic also offer the 12400 Gateway.  This has 6x 10ge ports.   However, like 
the Mellanox, I understand they only provide host vNIC support.

I'll leave it to representatives from Voltaire, Mellanox and Qlogic to update 
us. Particularly on support for InfiniBand to Ethernet Gateway for RoCEE.  This 
is needed so that RDMA sessions can be run between InfiniBand and RoCEE 
connected hosts.  I don't believe this will work over any of the today's 
available products.

Richard

-----Original Message-----
From: sebastien dugue [mailto:sebastien.du...@bull.net] 
Sent: 06 December 2010 11:40
To: Richard Croucher
Cc: 'OF EWG'; 'linux-rdma'
Subject: Re: [ewg] IPoIB to Ethernet routing performance

On Mon, 6 Dec 2010 10:49:58 -0000
"Richard Croucher" <rich...@informatix-sol.com> wrote:

> You may be able to improve by doing some OS tuning.

  Right, I tried a few things concerning the TCP/IP stack tuning but nothing
really came out of it.

>  All this data should stay in kernel mode but there are lots of bottlenecks in
> the TCP/IP stack that limit scalability.

  That may be my problem in fact.

>  The IPoIB code has not been optimized for this use case.

  I don't think IPoIB to be the bottleneck. In this case as I managed to feed
2 IPoIB streams between the client and the router yielding about 40 Gbits/s 
bandwidth.

> 
> You don't mention what Server, kernel and OFED distro you are running.

  Right, sorry. The router is one of our 4 sockets Nehalem-EX box with 2 IOHs 
which
is running an OFED 1.5.2.

> 
> The best performance is achieved using InfiniBand/Ethernet hardware gateways.
> Most of these provide virtual Ethernet NICs to InfiniBand hosts, but the 
> Voltaire
> 4036E does provide a  IPoIB to Ethernet gateway capability.  This is FPGA 
> based
> so does provide much higher performance than you will achieve using a 
> standard server solution.

  That may be a solution indeed. Are there any real world figures out there
concerning the 4036E performance?

  Thanks Richard,

  Sébastien.


> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ewg-boun...@lists.openfabrics.org 
> [mailto:ewg-boun...@lists.openfabrics.org] On Behalf Of sebastien dugue
> Sent: 06 December 2010 10:25
> To: OF EWG
> Cc: linux-rdma
> Subject: [ewg] IPoIB to Ethernet routing performance
> 
> 
>   Hi,
> 
>   I know this might be off topic, but somebody may have already run into the 
> same
> problem before.
> 
>   I'm trying to use a server as a router between an IB fabric and an Ethernet 
> network.
> 
>   The router is fitted with one ConnectX2 QDR HCA and one dual port Myricom 
> 10G
> Ethernet adapter.
> 
>   I did some bandwidth measurements using iperf with the following setup:
> 
>   +---------+               +---------+               +---------+
>   |         |               |         |   10G Eth     |         |
>   |         |    QDR IB     |         +---------------+         |
>   | client  +---------------+  Router |   10G Eth     |  Server |
>   |         |               |         +---------------+         |
>   |         |               |         |               |         |
>   +---------+               +---------+               +---------+
> 
>   
>   However, the routing performance is far from what I would have expected.
> 
>   Here are some numbers:
> 
>   - 1 IPoIB stream between client and router: 20 Gbits/sec
> 
>     Looks OK.
> 
>   - 2 Ethernet streams between router and server: 19.5 Gbits/sec
> 
>     Looks OK.
> 
>   - routing 1 IPoIB stream to 1 Ethernet stream from client to server: 9.8 
> Gbits/sec
> 
>     We manage to saturate the Ethernet link, looks good so far.
> 
>   - routing 2 IPoIB streams to 2 Ethernet streams from client to server: 9.3 
> Gbits/sec
> 
>     Argh, even less that when routing a single stream. I would have expected
>     a bit more than this.
> 
> 
>   Has anybody ever tried to do some routing between an IB fabric and an 
> Ethernet
> network and achieved some sensible bandwidth figures?
> 
>   Are there some known limitations in what I try to achieve?
> 
> 
>   Thanks,
> 
>   Sébastien.
> 
> 
> 
> 
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