Patent ID: 8228913

Claim:
A method for implementing system to system communication in a switchless non-InfiniBand (IB) compliant environment, an InfiniBand (IB) fabric including a plurality of IB links, each system including a Host Channel Adapters (HCA) connected to respective IB links of the an InfiniBand (IB) fabric, and each HCA including IB multicast facilities, said method comprising: providing a predetermined multicast address used by the HCAs for communicating between HCAs ; a first HCA sending multicast messages destined to the predetermined multicast address on respective IB links of the IB fabric prior to local ID addresses (LIDs) being assigned in the non-InfiniBand (IB) compliant environment without IB switches and without a common Subnet Manager (SM) entity; providing a flow of the multicast messages on the IB fabric until an HCA on the IB fabric picks up the multicast messages; a second HCA receiving incoming packets on at least one respective IB link of the IB fabric, identifying the predetermined multicast address, and receiving the multicast messages without forwarding the multicast messages; and responsive to the first HCA sending multicast messages destined to the predetermined multicast address, the second HCA sending multicast response messages, establishing higher level IB connections.