Start-up brings RDMA to Gigabit Ethernet

Boston-based start-up Ammasso this week unveiled a Gigabit Ethernet server adapter that supports Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA).

The Ammasso 1100 will work with standard Ethernet infrastructure – switches, cables and so forth. But the company claims it can improve the performance of application data transfers by five to 10 times.

RDMA is a set of technologies for letting a computer place information directly into the memory of another computer over a network. Because the network interface cards are handling all of the transfer, the server processors are freed from having to perform that task themselves.

This capability could be especially useful in server clusters, where transfers between different servers in a cluster are common, or between servers and storage devices in a data center. The IETF and the RDMA Consortium are working on protocol standards for RDMA. RDMA isn’t Ethernet-specific; in fact, Ammasso claims its adapter is the first to use RDMA over Ethernet.

Today, the Ammasso 1100 supports the Message Passing Interface used in scientific applications and the Direct Access Provider Library targeted at enterprise firms.

Ammasso was founded in 2002, and it received $10 million in funding from venture capital firms last year.

The Ammasso 1100 is expected to ship next month. Pricing was not revealed.