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Over the past decades, InfiniBand and Ethernet continued to compete delivering the best features to end users.

As the most widely used network protocol in the market, Ethernet has several advantages, including its compatibility with most devices and its cost advantage.

However, as the Internet today has grown into a large infrastructure that provides various data intensive applications, organizations are establishing data centers to address the needs of dependable computing of the explosive volume of data.

Here are the reasons why InfiniBand stands out from the competition:

Highly efficient and low latency.

InfiniBand is the most efficient network protocol.Because of its architecture, InfiniBand delivers exceptional throughput and low latency, it incorporates processing engines inside the network that accelerate data processing for deep learning and high-performance computing.

Scalability

InfiniBand has a highly scalable architecture. It can support thousands of nodes within a single subnet and could also be extended through InfiniBand routers to create nearly unlimited cluster sizes.

On the opposite, Ethernet has its limitations regarding expandability due to its nature. Additional routers, switches and many meters of wires are needed for network expansion and the speed is limited.

RDMA

InfiniBand supports RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access), a technology that allows users directly access the virtual memory on remote computers. The RDMA technology provides low latency through stack bypass and copy avoidance, reduces CPU utilization, memory bandwidth bottlenecks and provides high bandwidth utilization.

The above reasons make InfiniBand the dominant technology in the field of high-performance computing (HPC), deep-learning infrastructures, and hyperscale cloud data centers.