News
Critia Computer Introduces Industry's First XMC.4 Mezzanine Card
InfiniBand Adapter Uses HyperTransport Technology to Provide Low-Latency Clustering Capability
Raleigh, NC November 11, 2005 Critia Computer announced today an XMC that gives embedded systems access to low-latency, high-bandwidth clustering technology. The IBX-4204 mezzanine card uses the InfiniPath InfiniBand ASIC from PathScale to bring low-latency, high-bandwidth clustering capability to embedded form factors such as CompactPCI and VME, and is the first XMC to use HyperTransport as the host interface.
Most clustering solutions are aimed at form factors like EATX that are commonly used in 1U servers in datacenters, says Critia President Ken Boyette. However, the need exists for running HPC applications on embedded systems too. Critias IBX-4204 provides leading-edge clustering performance in an industry-standard form factor suitable for use in embedded systems.
The IBX-4204 XMC provides a single 4X InfiniBand port compatible with commodity InfiniBand 1.1 switches and cabling. The port has a unidirectional bandwidth of 954MB/s, one-way MPI latency of 1.29 microseconds, the industrys smallest n½ streaming message size of 385 bytes, and is capable of 3.3 million messages per second. A throughput of 583MB/s with a latency of 6.7 microseconds can be achieved for TCP/IP applications.
XMC, introduced in 2005 by the VITA 42 standard, is an evolution of the pervasive PCI Mezzanine Card (PMC) which adds one or more high-speed connectors to support modern serial switched fabric technologies. VITA 42.4, commonly known as XMC.4, defines those high-speed connectors for HyperTransport use. In addition to HyperTransport, other available XMC protocol standards include Parallel RapidIO, Serial RapidIO, and PCI Express. XMC and XMC.4 are open standards maintained by the VMEbus International Trade Association, an ANSI-accredited standards body.
The IBX-4204 is supported by a suite of open source software including the MPICH message-passing libraries and the OpenIB software stack. Supported operating environments include the Fedora Core 3, Fedora Core 4, SuSE Linux 9.3, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.x distributions.
About Critia Computer
Based in the technology-centric Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina, startup Critia Computer designs and manufactures computer modules for building high-end embedded systems. Critias products are based on industry standards and will become critical components of systems for automation, realtime control, image processing, telecommunications and networked computing. For more details, visit or telephone 1-919-821-1896.
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