Chelsio NICs

Chelsio Communications offers 1 and 10Gb Ethernet connectivity especially for high-performance systems via their proprietary ASIC and the PCI-X/PCI Express form factor interface cards built around it. Currently in their third generation, the cards offered by the vendor include the S310/S320, R310, and N310/N320 families, all based on the vendor's Terminator 3 ASIC.

The vendor describes their Terminator 3 ASIC (and thus the cards that utilize it) as a "Unified Wire Engine," simultaneously supporting iSCSI, RDMA, and TCP/IP applications. Key features of the ASIC include a programmable architecture in which the processor loads its instructions at boot time (facilitating field upgrades) as well as a TCP/IP Offload Engine that can be customized via register access. Specifically, the ASIC can offload TCP processing per connection, per server, per interface, and globally; and process offloaded operations while simultaneously tunneling non-offload traffic to the host processor.

Other T3 features include:

- Support for up to 1 million simultaneous TCP/IP offloaded connections; support for up to 64,000 simultaneous IEFT RDDP and RDMAC iWARP compliant connections

- Support for Direct Data Placment (DDP)

- An iSCSI initiator and target mode stack

- A built-in traffic manager with multiple transmit and receive queues with QoS

- Support for PCI X and PCI Express hosts

- Rule-based packet steering/filtering capabilities, with support for "tens of thousands" of rules

Upon this 3rd generation ASIC, the vendor offers multiple individual cards sporting 10 Gb connectivity. Currently offered cards include:

- The S310/S320 family, with multiple flavors including single (PCIe or PCI-X format cards, with CX4 copper, SR fiber (now including SFP+), or XFP (LR/SR)) or dual (XFP SR or LR, in PCIe or PCI-X 2.0 form factors; CX4 in PCIe; 10/100/1G CX4 in PCI-X; 10G XAUI in the S320EM-BCH) interfaces. The S310/S320s include the full feature set of the T3s, including TOE, RDMA, and iSCSI processing. The S320EM-BCH in particular is a mezzanine card qualified (by Blade.org) for use in the IBM BladeCenter H and boasting dual 10G XAUI ports.

- The R310, a single port card (CX4) in PCIe format. The R310 includes the RDMA features of the T3 ASIC, with iSCSI delivered via software (no hardware acceleration).

- The N310/N320 cards, also two single port cards (CX4 or SR Fiber) and a dual port card (CX4 copper) in PCIe formats. The N310 includes only the iSCSI capabilities of the card (and that via software, not hardware).

Other cards currently available from Chelsio include the S302/304, dual and quad 1 Gig port cards in PCIe and PCI-X form factors; and the T3 ASIC itself, which can also be separately purchased.

New to the Chelsio NIC capabilities is support for Scali MPI Connect, a Message Passing Interface that Scali states features multi-core awareness (specific tuning and optimizations for multi-core systems), support for multiple interconnects (including Ethernet, InfiniBand, InfiniPath, and Myrinet), and automatic network selection and network failover capabilities, among other features.

Visit the Chelsio Web site for further information.

product submission by EITPlanet Staff

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