Gilad Shainer, Senior Director, Technical Computing, Mellanox Technologies

Latency, throughput, RDMA, security, offloading are among the most critical capabilities that influence application performance in high-performance data centers and beyond. For years, Ethernet lagged behind other networking solutions in providing a real low-latency solution, and while many organizations claim to achieve low-latency Ethernet, in most cases, the latency is still an order of magnitude higher than what is required. To enable true low-latency Ethernet, new proposals are raising the idea of using different transport protocols on top of Ethernet, as these transports have been proven to provide low-latency and other important networking elements. InfiniBand has already provided sub-micro second latencies and excels in throughput, and is now demonstrating new capabilities that have been desired by leading-edge data centers and high performance clustering and positions itself as the leading solution for the most scalable systems in the world. In-between, we are witnessing the formulation of clouds - enterprise clouds, high-performance clouds, on premise clouds and more.

Clouds can be seen as a superset of data centers and HPC systems, or maybe as a new environment with its own requirements. The Session will review the latest development in the networking world (both Ethernet and InfiniBand) and how these developments help making clouds more efficient and accessible. Various examples of usage cases and simulation results will be reviewed as well.