RoCE (RDMA over converged Ethernet) is a hardware offload feature supported on PCIe-PoE572bt/PCIe-N572, which allows RDMA functionality over an Ethernet network supported in Linux, Windows and VMWare.
RoCE is based on ethernet to adopt RDMA feature. In PCIe-PoE572bt, we support RoCEv2 which is a network layer protocol and a version of RoCE to fit ethernet transport. RoCEv2 bases on UDP/IPv4 or UDP/IPv6 and it is routable and it is been supported more and more nowadays.
One of the advantages of RoCE/RDMA is to help to reduce CPU workload since it provides direct memory access for applications bypassing the CPU. As the packet processing and memory access are done in hardware, RoCE allows for higher throughput, lower latency, and lower CPU.
This kind of technology would be suitable to utilize on both the sender and the receiver side, which are critical for Machine Learning (ML/AI), Storage, High Performance Compute (HPC) applications and High Resolution Image transfer.
In PCIe-PoE572bt/PCIe-N572, we use Broadcom 57416 ethernet controller to realize 10GBase-T transport and RDMA (RoCEv2) feature.
The benefits to use RDMA list:
Allows an application on one host CPU to read and write data directly from a remote CPU's memory.
Transfers data between applications without CPU involvement.
Enables high bandwidth, low latency, and low overhead communication
