InfiniBand finally delivers

Initially, Mellanox's low level drivers and firmware were still in early development releases, and performance was not that impressive. However, right before SuperComputing 2002, a succession of new firmware and drivers pushed the peak bandwidth achievable up to over 6 gigabits. This peak bandwidth was far above performance achievable on Myrinet, SCI/Dolphin, or 10 Gigabit Ethernet at the time. At this time, Dr. D.K. Panda's group at Ohio State University released their implementation of MPICH [MVAPICH] for Mellanox's VAPI InfiniBand software stack.

By SuperComputing 2003, several vendors, including InfiniCon had integrated together a software stack, based on the Mellanox low level drivers, an InfiniBand access layer, and MPI implementations based on MVIAPICH [InfiniCon]. There was also a large demand, particularly among the DOE laboratories and third party vendors, like Oracle, for Open Source InfiniBand drivers. At this point, all the major vendors were shipping products based on the Mellanox InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter (HCA). This led to vendors being reluctant to support an open-source solution, since they were attempting to differentiate and add value in the software stack.