InfiniBand Congestion Control, Modelling and validation

In a lossless interconnection network congestion may results in performance degradation if no countermeasure is taken. To relieve the consequences of congestion, and by that to achieve good utilization of networks resources even at high network load, congestion control (CC) has been added to the InfiniBand specification. The behavior of the InfiniBand CC is, however, governed by a set of CC parameters. Exactly how to set these parameters to ensure an all over efficient network is still not well understood. It is time consuming, costly and hard to explore the CC parameter space in a large scale cluster. Therefore, a simulation platform is needed. In this paper we present our CC capable IB model implemented in the OMNeT++ environment. We explain the basics of our model, and validate it against CC capable hardware to show its high accuracy.