About the RoCE Initiative
The RoCE Initiative, an education and resource program of the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA), is committed to increasing RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) awareness by providing technical education and reference solutions for high performance Ethernet topologies in traditional and cloud-based data centers. The RoCE Initiative produces training webinars and sponsors events with leading providers of RDMA technology as well as resource materials for those interested in learning more about improving data center performance.
IBTA members are leading the advancement of the enterprise data center through the development of specifications, benchmarking performance improvements, and by presenting case studies that address the need for efficient data movement, improved application performance and reduced total cost of ownership.
About RoCE — RDMA over Converged Ethernet
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a critical technology at the heart of the fastest supercomputers and many of the largest data centers in the world but has expanded into enterprise markets and is now being widely adopted over Ethernet networks. RDMA over Converged Ethernet or RoCE (pronounced “rocky”) is driving an advanced data center architecture that eliminates dedicated storage area networks and converges compute, networking and storage onto a single fabric. Leveraging the latest advances in reliable Ethernet and Data Center Bridging (DCB), efficient RDMA mechanisms in RoCE provide lower CPU overhead and increase mainstream data center application performance over Layer 2 and Layer 3 fabrics at all of today’s Ethernet speeds and beyond.
Data center architects running RDMA applications on an Ethernet infrastructure can expect to see application performance and efficiency improvements that come from the offloading of data movement and the higher availability of CPU resources to the application. Higher server productivity reduces the need for additional servers creating cost and power savings. Adopters of RoCE can make use of RDMA’s capabilities without leaving the familiar transport and network management system of Ethernet. In this way, adopters are able to upgrade their application performance without investing in alternative switching interconnect technologies.
Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) is a remote memory management capability that allows server-to-server data movement directly between application memory without any CPU involvement. Offloading the chore of data movement from the CPU makes both the data movement and the execution of applications more efficient. RDMA delivers performance and efficiency gains that are not available from any other communications protocol including: low latency, improved resource utilization, flexible resource allocation, scalability and fabric unification.
About IBTA
Founded in 1999, the InfiniBand® Trade Association (IBTA) is a global member organization dedicated to developing, maintaining and furthering the InfiniBand™ specification of which RoCE is a part. The IBTA is led by a distinguished steering committee that includes HPE, IBM, Intel, and NVIDIA. Other members of the IBTA represent leading enterprise IT vendors who are actively contributing to the advancement of the InfiniBand specification.
The IBTA is responsible for compliance and interoperability testing of commercial products and has successfully added hundreds of products to its Integrators’ List.
The IBTA unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources, and actively promotes InfiniBand and RoCE from a vendor-neutral perspective through online communications, marketing and public relations engagements.
Supporting Members
The RoCE Initiative is an education and resource program of the InfiniBand Trade Association.
