DAT Collaborative

IBM's Microelectronics Division has published a standard set of operating system application programming interfaces (APIs) for InfiniBand™ host channel adapter (HCA) products. These interfaces, called Access APIs, consist of an operating system API for transport services, and a management service and communication management API set.

These APIs were designed to enable software interfaces for InfiniBand HCA standard products and to permit access to InfiniBand functions that will more fully enable the capabilities of switched fabric devices in the data center.

IBM Microelectronics offers a highly-integrated, end-to-end suite of InfiniBand standard products under the name InfiniBlue™. These products include a 4X PCI-X to InfiniBand HCA; a 4x eight-port fabric switch; a 4X xCA channel adapter based on its 4X HCA that can be deployed as a dual-port target channel adapter; a 12X eight-port fabric switch; and a sixteen-port fabric switch with four 12X ports and twelve 4X ports.

IBM Microelectronics is a member of the DAT Collaborative, an industry group created to define and submit for standardization a set of transport-independent, platform-independent APIs that exploit the remote direct memory access (RDMA) capabilities of next-generation interconnect technologies such as InfiniBand, the Virtual Interface Architecture and iWARP. The DAT Collaborative currently consists of more than 30 members of the computer hardware and software industry. IBM is represented in the organization by both the Microelectronics Division and the Toronto-based DB2 software group.

For more information, contact:
Jim Bowers, Manager of Standard Products
IBM Microelectronics Division
(802) 769-2552

The downloadable IBM InfiniBand Access API is available here (836KB zip - updated 10/20/02 )

The downloadable IBM InfiniBand Access API header files are available here (19KB tgz - updated 10/23/02)