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We are new to Infiniband and are considering Infiniband technology to use in our data center. We have been reading on the net about Infiniband and are surprised to read about the nightmares of getting Infiniband running on Linux systems.

Is this true? Should we consider Infiniband or not? If so, what brand/card/model is recommended for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS? Recommendations? Considerations?

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  • Do you have any experience getting 12.0.4 setup as a SRP target?
    – user165619
    Jun 8, 2013 at 20:43

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Setting up InfiniBand on 12.04 should be smooth (except for one minor thing, see below). Most of the horror stories you read are about people that download OFED packages and mess up their systems running some random installer script that stomps all over their system and installs new kernel packages. Don't do that -- just use what's already packaged in Ubuntu!

For IB hardware, really the only choice is Mellanox. You might as well get the latest ConnectX-3 hardware if you are buying new; otherwise you can get some very cheap hardware on Ebay.

Because of older package versions in 12.04 (launchpad bug: ConnectX-3 not supported until 12.10) you'll want to use my PPA to get up-to-date libibverbs/libmlx4 packages if you are using ConnectX-3 adapters (the latest). Other than that, 12.04 should work pretty smoothly.

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