First, some history of our experience with InfiniBand. Our first real exposure was at the InfiniBand Birds of a Feather at Ottawa Linux Symposium 2001 [InfiniBand BOF]. After this, we obtained InfiniBand HCA's and a switch development platform from Mellanox [Mellanox Technolgies].
At one point, both IBM and Intel had plans for making Host Channel adapters. Unfortunately, due to the 'dot-bomb' phenomenon, and other reasons known only to IBM and Intel decision makers, both companies canceled their plans for InfiniBand host adapters. However, Intel did keep on a team of software engineers on staff and open sourced their access layer. This code base was placed into a sourceforge project, and is generally referred to as the Intel Verbs layer, or IBAL [IBAL]. Unfortunately, since there was no shipping hardware, this access layer project got little attention outside of Intel.
