Studying the influence of the InfiniBand packet size to guarantee QoS

InfiniBand (IBA) has been proposed as an industry-standard architecture both for I/O server and interprocessor communication. IBA employs a switched point-to-point network, instead of using a shared bus. IBA is being developed by the InfiniBand_SM Trade Association to provide present and future server systems with the required levels of reliability, availability, performance, scalability, and quality of service (QoS). In previous papers we have proposed an effective strategy for configuring the IBA networks to provide users with the required levels of QoS. This strategy is based on the proper configuration of the mechanisms IBA carries to support QoS. Specifically, our methodology configures the InfiniBand arbitration tables and uses the different service levels and virtual lanes that are available, in order to segregate the different traffic flows. Thus, each flow receives the treatment it has previously requested. Moreover, by using our methodology, applications can be assured that their requirements will be satisfied. In this paper, we review the basis of our methodology and we study the influence of the packet size on the QoS guaranteed to the applications.