Fabric communications

This information provides a description of fabric communications and the main components that are part of the application data flow.

For more specific documentation references, see Cluster information resources.

The following figure shows the main components of the fabric data flow.

Figure 1. Main components in fabric data flow

The following figure shows the high-level software architecture.

Figure 2. High-level software architecture

The following figure shows a simple InfiniBand configuration illustrating the tasks, the software layers, the windows, and the hardware. The host channel adapter (HCA) shown is intended to be a single HCA card with four physical ports. However, the figure could also be interpreted as a collection of physical HCAs and a port; for example, two cards, each with two ports.

Figure 3. Simple configuration with InfiniBand