DAT Collaborative

January 15, 2002
VIEO is pleased to contribute its Channel Abstraction Layer (CAL) API specification to the DAT Collaborative under the terms of the DAT Contribution Agreement, to assist in development of a DAT reference implementation. We intend to follow next week with a public announcement and posting to our own web site for those implementers who may not be DAT Collaborative participants. A CAL Reference Manual is attached, and an abstract follows below.

February 19, 2002
In addition to the previously submitted VIEO Channel Abstraction Layer (CAL) API, attached is the VIEO Communication Manager (CM) API, both of which are usable for reference implementations of DAT on InfiniBand fabrics. The purpose of the CAL API is simply to abstract the interface to the IBA channel adapter (and not the combination of channel adapter plus OS, as with the IBA Verbs abstraction). The purpose of the CM API is to abstract the interface to IBA management entities and non-IBA enterprise directory services involved in service registration, connection establishment, path migration, and service and path queries. Both APIs are defined for efficiency and performance using standard ISO C.

VIEO CAL Abstract
The VIEO Channel Abstraction Layer (CAL) Application Programming Interface (API) is a vendor-independent interface specification for InfiniBand channel adapter hardware, expanding upon earlier descriptions published by Intel Press. In terms of the InfiniBand Architecture, the CAL layer sits underneath the transport interface, between the transport implementation and the channel adapter device. The CAL API can be exploited to implement industry standard transports such as DAT, as well as InfiniBand native transports, in a highly efficient and performant manner. It is designed to support both kernel and user mode host transport implementations, as well as embedded target implementations, and has been utilized in a variety of transport implementations by various development teams.

The downloadable VIEO CAL API is available here (pdf - 705KB)
The downloadable Communication Management API is available here (pdf - 285KB) The downloadable Channel Abstraction Layer API V2.0 is available here (pdf - 56KB) The downloadable CAL and CM header files are available here (zip - 25KB)