Infiniband support

IBM® Spectrum Symphony takes advantage of Infiniband hardware by using IBM's User Space Sockets (USS) library. The USS library supports only Linux® platforms for x86_64 and PowerPC64 architectures with IBM Spectrum Symphony Advanced Edition.

Prerequisites

  • OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) version 1.5.3 or higher must be installed and configured.
  • On systems with different network devices, either the IBM Spectrum Symphony cluster has to be installed with host name resolved to the Infiniband device or the EGO multi-homed configuration must be used.

USS library usage

To use the USS library, a USS daemon process must be running. On a cluster host, the USS daemon is configured as an EGO service named "USSD", but it is not started automatically. To enable auto-starting, open the ussd.xml service configuration file and change sc:StartType from MANUAL to AUTOMATIC.

On a non-cluster host, the USS daemon executable is located at ${EGO_SERVERDIR}/ussd. Use the -h command line option to get details about the daemon's arguments. If the USS daemon process is restarted, all IBM Spectrum Symphony applications that use USS must be restarted.

USS library libuss.so must be in ${LD_LIBRARY_PATH} search paths; this library is installed in the ${EGO_LIBDIR} directory.

To enable USS library usage, in the Consumer section of the application profile, set the externalSocketsLibrary parameter to USS.

Network performance for large messages may be improved by setting environment variables PLATCOMMDRV_TCP_RECV_BUFFER_SIZE and PLATCOMMDRV_TCP_SEND_BUFFER_SIZE to increase the size of the communication send and receive buffers.