Mellanox MCX556A-ECAT 100 Gb/s Dual-port (2 x QSFP28) PCI Express 3.0 x16

Product Overview

The MCX556A-ECAT is a ConnectX-5 VPI (Virtual Protocol Interconnect) adapter card. It is a dual-port network interface card designed for high-performance computing (HPC), cloud, data analytics, and storage platforms .

Key Specifications

• Product SKU / Legacy OPN: MCX556A-ECAT .

• Device Type: Network Adapter / VPI Adapter Card .

• Form Factor: Plug-in Card (Tall Bracket) .

• Ports: Dual-port (2 x QSFP28) .

• Max Data Rate: 100 Gb/s per port .

• Host Interface: PCI Express 3.0 x16 .

Protocol & Standard Support

• Data Link Protocols:

  • InfiniBand: EDR (100 Gb/s), FDR, QDR, DDR, SDR .

  • Ethernet: 100GbE, 50GbE, 40GbE, 25GbE, 10GbE, 1GbE .

• Network / Transport Protocols: TCP/IP, UDP/IP, iSCSI .

• Compliant Standards:

  • Ethernet/IEEE: IEEE 802.1Q (VLANs), 802.1p, 802.3ad (LACP), 802.3ae (10GbE), 802.3ap, 802.3az, 802.3ba (40/100GbE), 802.3bj, 802.3bm (100GbE), 802.3by (25/50GbE), 802.1Qbb (PFC), 802.1Qaz (ETS), 802.1Qau (QCN), IEEE 1588v2 .

  • InfiniBand: IBTA 1.3 .

  • Compliance: RoHS R6 .

Features & Offloads

• VPI (Virtual Protocol Interconnect): Supports seamless switching between InfiniBand and Ethernet on the same hardware .

• RDMA / RoCE: Native RDMA and RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) support for low-latency, high-performance networking .

• HPC Offloads: MPI Tag Matching, Rendezvous offloads, MPI AlltoAll, Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT), and Adaptive Routing on Reliable Transport .

• Storage Acceleration: NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) Target Offloads and T10-DIF Signature Handover .

• Virtualization & Cloud: ASAP2 (Accelerated Switching and Packet Processing) for OVS offload, SR-IOV, and hardware-based I/O virtualization .

• Overlay Networks: Hardware offloads for NVGRE and VXLAN encapsulation/decapsulation .

• Other Features: PCIe Switch embedded, Host Chaining, Mellanox PeerDirect, Burst Buffer offload, Jumbo Frame support (9.6KB) .

Physical & Environmental

• Interfaces: 2 x 100Gb Ethernet / 100Gb InfiniBand QSFP28 connectors .

• Dimensions (W x D): 5.6 in (Depth) x 2.7 in (Height) .

• Airflow Requirement (LFM): 350 (Passive cable) to 1300 (Active 5W cable) .

Firmware & Identification

• PSID: MT_0000000008 .

• Device ID (Example): ConnectX5 .