NAME: OLA-FOLUWE, DAMARIS ONAMIYOLUWA

REG NO: CSC/2013/147

DEPT: COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
FACULTY: TECHNOLOGY
DATE: 31/10/2016
ASSIGNMENT TWO
Compare and contrast the Infiniband and the Firewire with USB and Ethernet.
FireWire and USB
FireWire (IEEE 1394) and USB (Universal Serial Bus) are standards for communication
between electronic devices. They are both an interface standard for a serial bus i.e. they
transmit data serially one bit at a time as opposed to parallel transmission. Firewire support
63 devices while USB 2.0 supports 127 devices per host controller. They are external
interfaces that support plug n play and are hot swappable. USB uses a master-slave
configuration, while FireWire uses a peer to peer connection. The master slave
configuration of USB requires overhead on the host (PC) side in order to maintain the
transfer of data between host and client, hence reducing overall sustained data rates. The
advantage of the peer to peer connection of Firewire strategy is that IEEE-1394 provides
sustained data rates without requiring a computer host for interconnection between
peripherals. USB 3.0 is the latest version of USB released in year 2008 with a theoretical
speed of 4.8Gb/s. Firewire 800 also known as IEEE 1394b is the latest version of Firewire
with a speed of 800Mb/s. USB powers external devices up to a maximum of 5V while
Firewire powers external devices up to a maximum of 12V. USB was designed to provide a
simple, low cost port connection, while FireWire was designed for a higher performance
particularly in time-sensitive applications like audios and videos. USB is a small and medium
bandwidth connection for digital cameras, keyboards, mice, and other similar I/O devices. On
the other hand, IEEE 1394 is a high-speed bus designed for digital video cameras, DVD
players, mass storage devices, and other peripherals that require greater bandwidth.
Infiniband and Ethernet
Infiniband is a switched fabric communication link designed for high performance
computing. Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) is a communication standard for networks. Infiniband is

relatively new compared to Ethernet. The latest version of Ethernet is 10 Gigabit Ethernet
also known as 10GigE. The two technologies both have protocol based layered architectures.
Ethernet uses a seven layer OSI reference model or a four layer TCP/IP reference model.
Infiniband on the other hand uses a four layered protocol architecture. The standards body for
Gigabit Ethernet is IEEE (Institute of Electrical Electronics Engineer) while the standards
body for Infiniband is Infiniband Trade Association. Gigabit Ethernet has a signalling speed
of 1.25Gbps with a major application in Local Area Networks (LAN) while Infiniband has a
signalling speed of 2.5Gbps with a major application in I/O Area Networks (IAN). Ethernet
uses a best effort delivery transmission method and relies on TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol) for error detection and correction. Infiniband uses a guaranteed
delivery transmission mechanism with hardware based retransmission. Gigabit Ethernet has
trunking as add on and is not as scalable as Infiniband which has trunking built into its
architecture.
REFRENCES
Kadav A. and Swift M. (2012) Understanding Modern Device Drivers ASPLOS XVII
Proceedings of the seventeenth international conference on Architectural Support for
Programming Languages and Operating Systems pp. 87-98.
Agarwal S., Starobinski D. and Trachtenberg A. (2002) On the Scalability of Data
Synchronization Protocols for PDAs and Mobile Devices, IEEE Network (Special Issue on
Scalability in Communication Networks) Vol 16, 4, pp. 22-28.
Technical Note at http://www.qimaging.com/support/pdfs/FirewireUSB.pdf
Otto A., Hugo D., Perez C., Neufeld N., Schwemmer R. and Pisani F. (2015) A first look at
100 Gbps LAN technologies, with an emphasis on future DAQ applications 21st
International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP2015)
IOP Publishing Journal of Physics: Conference Series p 664
Gurkirat Kaur, Manoj Kumar1, Manju Bala (2013) Performance Evaluation of Soft RoCE
over 1 Gigabit Ethernet IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering (IOSR-JCE) Volume 15,
Issue 4 http://www.iosrjournals.org pp. 81-87
Whitepaper at http://www.datastorageconnection.com/doc/comparing-fabric-technologiesinfiniband-arch-0001