Solaris based InfiniBand Subnet Manager?
Monday Mar 12, 2007
It seems that for various reasons that a lot of people want to be able to run 2 machines back to back with an IB interconnect.
While this should be a fairly simple operation to perform, life in the IB world makes it quites hard to achieve.
[...]What if Sun made the Solaris SM open source ?
I get asked about this about once a month.
Them: "I have two systems back to back with a single IB cable between them, how do I use the link?"
Me: "Are you using Solaris?"
Them: "Yes"
Me: "Ah. You are going to need a switch or use Linux ."
Them: "Why?"
Me: "IB isn't like Ethernet. It needs a Subnet Manager (SM) to enable systems to talk to one another. Without it no connections are permitted - nothing works. Almost all IB switches include a SM but when you have a two node configuration with no switch you need to use a host based SM. As the only other time you need a host based SM is in really ,really big configurations (1000's of nodes) there isn't much interest in making a host based SM available for Solaris.
The only free host based SM I'm aware of is OpenSM which is part of Open Fabrics. That only works on Linux as far as I'm aware."
Them: "Oh. So I can't use Solaris then"
Me: "No. Well not officially anyway. There is one written, but its not available outside Sun. It is only available as SPARC binaries too."
It's not a good situation, but until there is significant demand this situation is unlikely to get resolved.
Let Simon know about your requirements!
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