DAT Collaborative

Lane15 Software is privileged to contribute its Channel Interface Specification to the DAT Collaborative, under the terms of the DAT Contribution Agreement, to aid in the development of a DAT reference implementation. The Lane15 Channel Interface Specification is also available for download from the Lane15 Web site http://www.lane15.com.

Lane15 Software Channel Services
Channel Services sits below all upper level protocols and interfaces directly with InfiniBand hardware (Verbs) and connection management facilities. The Lane15 Channel Interface (CI) exposes a consumer-level API to Channel Services for use by upper-level application protocols.

The CI is vendor independent, exposes the full capabilities of InfiniBand (IB), and permits applications to run on an IB system area interconnect at a high performance level by giving CI consumers direct access to IB hardware. In this role, CI does not itself introduce performance penalties. For example, Data Transfer Operations (DTO) for send, receive, and completion notification are passed directly to the hardware level verbs interface. For these operations, CI supplies the consumer with the correct interface, then "gets out of the way".

The CI exists for the following reasons:

Hide privileged-level operations from non-privileged consumers
Provide a meaningful intersection of Verbs, Service Registration, and Communication Management (CM) functions
Provide a single interface for all higher-level protocol channel drivers
Provide a single interface to expose from kernel to user space
Provide a single point to address threading model and kernel boundary issues
Provide a single point for Quality of Service monitoring and control
Hide the complexities of interactions between CM, Connection End Point (CEP), and Verbs from the consumer; this keeps developers from 'rediscovering' these complexities
Provide automatic path migration across channel adapters, even if the channel adapters are from different vendors.

The downloadable Lane15 CI Specification is available here (pdf - 397KB). To take complete advantage of the Lane15 CI specification, download the Lane15 Verbs Interface Definition at: http://www.lane15.com/solution/mgmtsuite/library/verbs/dnldvrbs/