NVIDIA QM8700 & QM8790 HDR Switch - Transceiver and Cable Support Matrix

Introduction of NVIDIA/Mellanox HDR InfiniBand QM8700 and QM8790 Switches

NVIDIA/Mellanox QM8700 and QM8790 InfiniBand 200G HDR switches are built with Quantum™ InfiniBand switching fabric, providing up to 40 200Gb/s HDR ports, each port has complete bidirectional bandwidth, and can support connectivity at 200G HDR and previous data rates of 200G HDR/100G EDR/56G FDR/40G QDR through optical transceiver modules or cable products.

With the increasing demand for data bandwidth due to powerful servers combined with high-performance storage and applications that use increasingly complex computations, HPC environments and EDCs need every last bit of bandwidth delivered with NVIDIA Mellanox’s HDR InfiniBand systems. Built with the latest Mellanox Quantum™ HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand switch device, these standalone systems making them an ideal choice for top-of-rack leaf connectivity or for building small to extremely large-sized clusters. They come with features such as static routing, adaptive routing, and advanced congestion management, which ensure the maximum effective fabric bandwidth by eliminating congestion. Mellanox Quantum is designed to enable in-network computing through Mellanox Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation Protocol (SHARP)™ technology. SHARP architecture enables the usage of all active data center devices to accelerate the communications frameworks, resulting in order of magnitude applications performance improvements.

QM8700 and QM8790 InfiniBand HDR Switches Supported Transceiver and Cable

Active Optical Cables (AOC)

Direct Attached Copper Cables (DAC)

Optical Transceivers

QM8700 and QM8790 Supported 200G HDR Optical Transceivers and Cables for Different Interconnects

At present, InfiniBand networking mainly adopts the spine-leaf architecture, which is widely used in data centers, high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and other fields. The 200G HDR optical transceivers and cables supported by Mellanox QM8700 and QM8790 can be used to connect the HDR spine switch and the leaf switch, and connect the HDR leaf switch and the server systems.

HDR Switch to Switch Interconnection

The leaf layer switch aggregates the traffic from the server, and the spine switch interconnects all the leaf switches in the full mesh topology. Generally, the short distance between leaf switches and spine switches are interconnected through direct-connection DAC cables or AOC cables. Because whether it is AOC or DAC, higher port bandwidth, density and configurability can be achieved at a lower cost, which can reduce the power demand of the data center. However, for long-distance interconnection, HDR 200GBASE SR4 or HDR 200GBASE FR4 is generally used.

Leaf-spine architecture

Interconnect Between HDR Switches and Server Network Cards

For HPC data centers, high-speed direct attached copper cables are usually used for ToR (Top of Rack) interconnection between ToR switches and servers. Since the 200G QSFP56 InfiniBand HDR DAC cable supports a link up to 3m, and has the characteristics of low power consumption, low latency, high bandwidth and low cost, this DAC high-speed cable is ideal for short-distance server-to-switch connection.

At the same time, the breakout cable can split the 200G HDR QSFP56 (4x 50G PAM4) switch port into two ends of 100G HDR100 QSFP56 (2x 50G PAM4), so that the 40-port Mellanox QM8700 InfiniBand HDR switch can support 80 100G HDR100, which improves the port utilization.

Connection between ToR HDR switch and servers

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