OpenFabrics

About OpenFabrics

SCinet's OpenFabrics network was a project started by the OpenFabrics Alliance 4 years ago as a way to allow vendors and various organizations to demonstrate new technologies and applications using the OpenFabrics open-source software running over an InfiniBand network infrastructure.

The OpenFabrics Alliance is an international organization comprised of industry, academic and research groups, along with hardware and software vendors, that have developed a unified core of open source software leveraging RDMA architectures for both Linux and Windows operating systems over InfiniBand and Ethernet. The core OpenFabrics software supports all the well-known standard upper layer protocols such as IP, iSER, MPI, NFS, RDS, SDP, and SRP.

Even though OpenFabrics software is available for Ethernet networks, the SCinet OpenFabrics team has focused on using an InfiniBand network infrastructure at SC due to its mature ecosystem and proven reliability. InfiniBand is recognized as the industry's leading standards-based interconnect technology in terms of performance and cost. Deployed in thousands of production environments throughout the world, InfiniBand delivers the lowest latency of any interconnect available and provides plenty of bandwidth to move even the largest data sets with ease. InfiniBand supports up to 120 Gigabit interfaces today with an industry backed roadmap to deliver higher bandwidths as future business demands. Used in over 30% of the TOP500 supercomputers including 4 out of the top 10 systems, InfiniBand has become the preferred fabric technology for high performance computing and mass-storage environments.

What's New for SC09

For SC09, SCinet's OpenFabrics team is pleased to announce that the InfiniBand network will get a substantial speed increase. The OpenFabrics network will consist entirely of Quad Data Rate (QDR) 40-gigabit per second (Gbps) InfiniBand circuits including a backbone infrastructure comprised of multiple 120Gbps links between the core InfiniBand switching equipment.

SCinet will be offering the option to purchase either a 40Gbps (4X) or 120Gbps (12X) InfiniBand QDR network connections directly to exhibitor's booths. Pricing will be the same for both 40Gbps and 120Gbps network connections, but 120Gbps connections will require an exhibitor to supply a 12X capable InfiniBand QDR switch for network connectivity. Please be sure to reserve your connection early through SCinet's Connection Request System (CRS) if you’re planning to participate in the SC09 OpenFabrics network.

OpenFabrics Demos at SC09

In addition, the OpenFabrics team have joined up with the HPC Advisory Council and several other organizations and vendors to support and host a number of product demonstrations for SC09 including Scalable Graphics' Remote Desktop over InfiniBand (RDI), PSA Peugeot Citroen automotive 3D model visualization, accelerated NFS-RDMA, Booting over InfiniBand (BoIB), Network Failover and Automatic Path Migration (APM) using LNI's XANStorm, Bay Microsystems InfiniBand extension over the WAN, and high performance InfiniBand-based storage from RAID Incorporated. A number of these demonstrations will be made available to all exhibitors who wish to participate in the OpenFabrics network and would like to show these applications running in their booth.

Questions?

For additional information on SCinet's OpenFabrics InfiniBand network or questions on participating, please contact the OpenFabrics committee chairs Cary Whitney (whitney@nersc.gov) or Eric Dube (eric@baymicrosystems.com).