HPCwire: OpenFabrics Alliance Announces New Developments

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June 23, 2006

OpenFabrics Alliance Announces New Developments

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), formerly OpenIB Alliance, has announced the first release of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) for Linux; that IBM as a new member that will support OFA software; and the creation of the OpenFabrics Interoperability Working Group (IWG).

OpenFabrics Alliance will be discussing these developments at its first European Workshop in Paris, June 22-23, 2006, http://openfabrics.org/conference/june2006paris/.

Successful adoption of 10 Gb and 20 Gb InfiniBand fabrics in high performance compute clusters has sparked interest in using industry standard, high performance RDMA fabrics in enterprise grid computing. A robust, open source software stack for RDMA fabrics will accelerate adoption in grid and blade computing. The OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution enables customers to deploy an open source software stack for common cluster interconnect, storage and networking protocols. Customers can deploy new RDMA networking fabrics and be assured that their software investment is protected.

"Adoption of InfiniBand has grown rapidly in the high performance computing interconnect market," said Addison Snell, IDC's Research Director of High Performance Computing. "The market availability of a single, multi-vendor supported software stack will help enterprise users to realize the benefits of an RDMA-based interconnect and will accelerate adoption in the corporate data center."

OpenFabrics Welcomes IBM joining the Alliance

"Our membership in the OpenFabrics Alliance complements IBM's co-founding of the RDMA and InfiniBand technologies employed in OFED 1.0," said Dr. Tom Bradicich, IBM Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, IBM System x and BladeCenter Servers, and co-chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association. "As another advancement added to the vast open communities around IBM's server platforms, the common stack across RDMA technologies will afford more customer choice in our high performance and deep computing solutions."

"We believe the consolidation of interconnect technologies and network fabrics into one software stack is critical to the future expansion of blades and servers for both high performance computing and traditional enterprise applications," said Terri Hall, Vice President of Software Alliances for AMD. "As fabric bandwidth increases, applications need guaranteed scalability. RDMA-capable fabrics improve the end-to-end efficiency and scaling while lowering processing overhead and are great complements to AMD processor-enabled solutions."

OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution Released

The OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution 1.0 release (OFED 1.0) is the culmination of work by multiple manufacturers collaborating together to develop a well-tested, open source solution. OFED 1.0 will be distributed by Novell and Red Hat as well as several OpenFabrics members. The first release supports InfiniBand (iWARP support is in development). OFED helps ensure a customer's software investment is "future proofed" from vendor or technology lock-in.

"The OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution enables customer choice by offering one set of universal application interfaces that use standard protocols for both InfiniBand and Ethernet," said Shawn Hansen, director of product management, Server Switching and Virtualization Business Unit at Cisco Systems, and chair of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Working Group. "The OFED Enterprise Distribution creates a single distribution of RDMA protocols that are tested and supported by multiple vendors, enabling data center IT administrators to choose the fabric best suited for any given application, while mitigating future risk."

OpenFabrics Interoperability Working Group Created

One of the key advantages of OpenFabrics is interoperability between vendors, eliminating barriers to entry for the ecosystem of partners look to adopt RDMA. These interoperability tests converge at University of New Hampshire Interoperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) with work to develop a process and environment to create interoperable, enterprise-quality RDMA software. The OFA IWG has made the Interoperability Test Plan v0.8 available for download from the OFA website.

"UNH-IOL brings immediate credibility to the OFED testing by their unparalleled experience and extensive test facilities," said Tuan Phamdo, Director of Technology Initiative Enabling, Intel Corporation and Chair OFA Interoperability Working Group (IWG). "OFA has given our Working Group the charter to define and execute interoperability testing process, policy and procedure, for the OpenFabrics software stack. By working with UNH-IOL, OFA will ensure that OFED integrates into data center fabrics."

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