Qlogic Infiniband training
May. 19th, 2009 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylSpent the day on an excellent course learning all about QLogic's SilverStorm Infiniband switches. The training, provided by someone from QLogic with detailed knowledge of our set-up, was wonderfully concise and covered exactly what we needed to know.
The morning covered the topological details of the switches, each of which is built from a series of 24 port Mellanox switch chips linked together in a fat tree, and the IBM host channel adapters, which are actually switches in their own right in order to allow the Infiniband connections to be shared across LPARs.
Then, in the afternoon, we moved on to look at the subnet manager software and some of the query commands — something that required us to remember our theory from the morning. We looked at the web and command line interfaces, discovered how to interpret the error reports and learnt what was meant by a symbol error. We were also given an important warning: never to request statistics from the AIX host channel adapters because this, apparently, can cause the card to lock-up...
The morning covered the topological details of the switches, each of which is built from a series of 24 port Mellanox switch chips linked together in a fat tree, and the IBM host channel adapters, which are actually switches in their own right in order to allow the Infiniband connections to be shared across LPARs.
Then, in the afternoon, we moved on to look at the subnet manager software and some of the query commands — something that required us to remember our theory from the morning. We looked at the web and command line interfaces, discovered how to interpret the error reports and learnt what was meant by a symbol error. We were also given an important warning: never to request statistics from the AIX host channel adapters because this, apparently, can cause the card to lock-up...
