Ethernet

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Using Ethtool to query Network and Driver Information

Ethtool is a utility for configuration of Network Interface Cards (NICs). This utility allows querying and changing settings such as speed, port, auto-negotiation, PCI locations and checksum offload on many network devices, especially Ethernet devices.

1. Query the specified network device for associated driver information

# ethtool -i ens3f1np1
driver: mlx5_core
version: 5.7-1.0.2
firmware-version: 16.34.1002 (MT_0000000416)
expansion-rom-version:
bus-info: 0000:0f:00.1
supports-statistics: yes
supports-test: yes
supports-eeprom-access: no
supports-register-dump: no
supports-priv-flags: yes

2. Enable an operator to easily identify the adapter by sight.
This involves blinking one or more LEDs on the specified network port.

# ethtool -p ens3f1np1 5

where integer 5 represents the time in seconds to perform the action,

3. Turn off the AutoNegotiation and fixed it at 25GB

ethtool -s ens3f1np1 --speed 25000 --autoneg off --duplex full

References:

Red Hat Documentation 11.8. Ethtool

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A relook at InfiniBand and Ethernet Trends on Top500

I have put up a article from Nvidia Perspective on the Top 500 Interconnect Trends. There is another article put up by the NextPlatform that took a closer look at the Infiniband and Ethernet Trends

Taken from The Next Platform “The Eternal Battle Between Infiniband and Ethernet”

The penetration of Ethernet rises as the list fans out, as you might expect, with many academic and industry HPC systems not being able to afford InfiniBand or not willing to switch away from Ethernet. And as those service providers, cloud builders, and hyperscalers run Linpack on small portions of their clusters for whatever political or business reasons they have. Relatively slow Ethernet is popular in the lower half of the Top500 list, and while InfiniBand gets down there, its penetration drops from 70 percent in the Top10 to 34 percent in the complete Top500.

Nvidia’s InfiniBand has 34 percent share of Top500 interconnects, with 170 systems, but what has not been obvious is the rise of Mellanox Spectrum and Spectrum-2 Ethernet switches on the Top500, which accounted for 148 additional systems. That gives Nvidia a 63.6 percent share of all interconnects on the Top500 rankings. That is the kind of market share that Cisco Systems used to enjoy for two decades in the enterprise datacenter, and that is quite an accomplishment.

Taken from The Next Platform “The Eternal Battle Between Infiniband and Ethernet”

References:

The Eternal Battle Between Infiniband and Ethernet