High Performance Computing

Accelerated network performance where it counts

iWARP is a low-latency, high-bandwidth RDMA solution for Ethernet. iWARP runs over the widely-deployed TCP/IP protocol, delivering improved latency and performance compared to conventional Ethernet adapters, while retaining TCP/IP benefits like route-ability and guaranteed delivery.

iWARP implements these key performance features:

• Kernel-Bypass:  Enabling applications to interface directly to the Ethernet adapter removes the latency of the OS and the expensive CPU context switches between kernel-space and user-space.
• Direct Data Placement:  Writing the data directly into user space eliminates the need for wasteful, intermediate buffer copies, thus reducing processing latency and improving memory bandwidth.
• Transport Acceleration:  The TCP/IP and iWARP protocols are accelerated in silicon vs. host software stacks, thereby freeing up valuable CPU cycles for application compute processing.

Find out which Intel products support iWARP.

Industry demand for low-latency solutions

As computing performance repeatedly increases generation after generation, several industry applications and workloads have identified an increased need for low-latency network performance, especially in High Performance Computing (HPC). Industry examples include:

• Biomedical: Cluster computing has made it possible to achieve breakthrough advances in research areas such as bioinformatics, computation chemistry, and gene sequencing. These large-scale clustering workloads demand an efficient fabric, like iWARP, that is capable of providing low-latency and network scalability.
• Oil & Gas: Complex modeling of the Earth's subsurface requires large datasets that must be processed across many compute nodes.  Low-latency iWARP access provides improved performance and reduced bottlenecks.  This enables a larger workload of simulations, ultimately providing for an increased accuracy of reservoir modeling.
• CAD/CAE: Computing capabilities today allow for more thorough simulation versus real-world research.  Applications like aircraft aerodynamics and automobile crash testing are limited by the latency to the large, complex data models. Low-latency iWARP networking reduces the simulation time, thus improving the model coverage and overall product reliability.