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June 23, 2006
OpenFabrics Alliance Targets 'Datacenter Networking'
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Founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance to develop a Linux-based InfiniBand software stack, the OpenFabrics Alliance has recently expanded its charter to support iWARP (RDMA over Ethernet), in addition to InfiniBand. The OpenFabrics Alliance provides tools, communications and resources for vendors and developers to create, refine and publish standard open source software stacks for RDMA-capable datacenter fabrics. It is comprised of approximately 25 technology vendors and end-user organizations.
HPCwire got the opportunity to speak with Jim Ryan, Chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance, just before he departed for this week's OpenFabrics Workshop in Paris. In this interview, he describes the mission of the Alliance and its significance to the high performance computing community.
HPCwire: Why did OpenIB change its name to OpenFabrics?
Ryan: The Alliance changed its name from OpenIB to OpenFabrics in March this year because we wanted to ensure HPC and datacenter customers' software would work no matter what underlying fabric they chose today or in the future. We're including the iWARP open source Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Ethernet code to our existing open source InfiniBand code, making one integrated stack.
HPCwire: Why should application providers be interested in OpenFabrics?
Ryan: The OpenFabrics Alliance is creating a multi-vendor supported open source software stack for the enterprise datacenter, as well as HPC environments. People are starting to call this field "datacenter networking" (DAN) to differentiate it from local area networking (LAN) because the infrastructure, service and application architectures that lead technical managers to deploy these two types of networking are quite different. For example, virtualization support in the network or fabric is required in the DAN but not the LAN.
HPCwire: What other differences does OpenFabrics enable?
Ryan: The LAN is about connectivity and servicing email, browsing, calendaring, information sharing, mobility, VoIP, etc.
Datacenter networking in the enterprise is to support multi-tiered servers running collaborative applications or applets accessing databases, and in increasingly more cases, the success of services these applets in a particular datacenter are highly interconnected. Therefore the applications are network bandwidth and latency dependent and frequently collaborating with applications running in related multi-tiered servers in other datacenters with a similar dependency. For some, this has become known as Grid Computing. For mainstream IT, this is the environment that Service Oriented Architectures enable.
Latencies in the typical datacenter are usually hundreds of milliseconds. Today's datacenter network is a collection of wires, 100 BaseT for management, GbE for communication and control and 2 Gb Fibre Channel for storage. In some cases, HPC customers have deployed proprietary cluster interconnect solutions.
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