HPCwire: OpenFabrics Alliance Targets 'Datacenter Networking'

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

June 23, 2006

OpenFabrics Alliance Targets 'Datacenter Networking'

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

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.

Page: 1 of 4
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html