Red Hat developer Pete Zaitcev once described InfiniBand in terms of an ancient parable. Speaking to a birds-of-a-feather session at the 2001 Ottawa Linux Symposium, he told of how a group of blind men came upon an elephant one day while walking in the woods. The first blind man reached out and grabbed the elephant’s tail and decided that they had come across a rope hanging from the ceiling; the second blind man put his arms around the elephant’s leg and declared that they had come across a tree; the third reached for the elephant’s trunk and thought it was a snake; and the story carries on.
To Zaitcev, this was the perfect analogy for the way different people perceived InfiniBand at the time. Some were excited about the specification’s potential to provide low latency interconnects, some talked about powerful 30 Gbps links, and still others saw it as a replacement for PCI, and so on.
Today, though, Zaitcev believes those perceptions have changed dramatically. “The analogy of the blind men used to describe the situation accurately in 2001,” he says. “But it’s 2003 now, and the tail has grown bigger than the rest of the elephant. The clustering aspect [of InfiniBand] has subsumed all the rest.”
Indeed, InfiniBand’s promise of becoming an all-encompassing I/O architecture seems to have almost disappeared…
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