Infiniband UIO vs Infiniband HCA

Question

What is the fundamental difference between:

• Infiniband Universal I/O Card (e.g. Supermicro AOC-UINF-M2)

  and

• Infiniband Host Channel Adapter (e.g. Qlogic QLE7240-CK)

Can't both of those do do IP-over-IB?

Answer 1

None?

UIO is not about what is ON the card, it is physical adapter form. So, both are Inifiband controllers, just one only fits into a UIP motherboard. This will have some part of the board missing so that the UIO card fits in.

Read the description of for example:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-UG-I4.cfm

It interfaces with Supermicro UIO motherboard through a PCI Express UIO slot to maximize the I/O bandwidth. The dedicated input/output connections of the PCI-e ensure priority performance on each port without bus-sharing

More info can be found at

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/UIO.cfm

Basically a propietary form factor and adapter, which has NOTHING to do with WHAT is on the card.

Answer 2

UIO is a Supermicro proprietary slot form. The advantage is that it keeps the addon card in the same plane as the motherboard, saving some space on 1U servers. The functionality differences about those models would be more about the exact chipset and drivers than about the slot form.