The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) has officially announced the release of GigE Vision 3.0, which is now available for download on the A3 website along with licensing information.
During the spring International Vision Standards Meeting (IVSM), held April 13-17 in Prague, the GigE Vision Technical Committee officially approved the specification. The IVSM was hosted by company imavix and the European Machine Vision Association (EMVA). The update integrates remote direct memory access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet version 2 (RoCEv2), which enables direct memory access from a device such as a camera to a computer without involving the operating system. The committee also introduced the GigE Vision RDMA Streaming Protocol (GVRSP).
During the GigE Vision session of the IVSM, 57 engineers met to vote on the standard, which passed unanimously, making the long-awaited release official.
"GigE Vision 3.0 will make data transfer faster by freeing system resources for real-time processing and decision-making, which is critical in today's machine vision landscape," said Bob McCurrach, A3's Director of Vision and Imaging Standards. "With continued increases in camera speeds, combined with multi-camera aggregation, GigE Vision 3.0 will allow today's systems to reach bandwidths of 400G and above with readily available and reasonably priced RoCEv2 NICs, opening entirely new machine vision and imaging solutions."
GigE Vision 3.0's primary update enables the use of RoCEv2, which allows direct memory access from a device such as a camera to a computer without involving the operating system. This update enables "zero-copy image transfer" as opposed to image data being copied from the source to operating system memory and then again to the user buffer. This means that system memory can be leveraged for image processing instead of image acquisition.
RoCE was initially developed to accelerate data transfer in high-performance computing environments such as data centers. RoCEv2 improves upon the first iteration, sitting atop the UDP/IP protocol, which ensures seamless integration and compatibility within Ethernet networks. Machine vision benefits of RoCEv2 in GigE Vision 3.0 include low CPU utilization, low latency, scalability, reliable and high-throughput image capture, and, as with all other GigE Vision iterations, compatibility, and interoperability. End users looking to leverage GVRSP to enable efficient image streaming for 25GigE and beyond will need a network interface card (NIC) that supports RoCEv2. An additional update is the expansion of the control channel, allowing for more data per packet, enabling more efficient transfer.
For more information contact:
Association for Advancing Automation (A3)
900 Victors Way, Ste. 140
Ann Arbor, MI 48108
734-994-6088
www.automate.org