ACADEMIA

OpenFabrics to Power Conference-wide SCinet Network, Enabling Exhibitors to Demonstrate Newest Capabilities across Transport-independent 10- and 20-Gigabit Fabrics: The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) announced that it will showcase the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.1 software stack at SC06, where it will help power the high-performance, conference-wide SCinet network. SCinet will enable exhibitors at SC06 to demonstrate their innovative applications, systems and technologies within one of the world’s most powerful networked environments. SC06 is scheduled for November 11-17 at the Tampa Convention Center. OFED 1.1 is the second release of a multi-vendor qualified, InfiniBand software stack with added enterprise reliability and failover capabilities. Participating exhibitors will demonstrate its usage with various applications running on the 20-gigabit InfiniBand SCinet fabric. The OpenFabrics Alliance will also provide an alpha version of the iWARP (RDMA over Ethernet) branch of the OpenFabrics software stack for exhibitors showcasing demonstrations over the 10-gigabit Ethernet SCinet fabric. This will make SCinet the first major implementation of a dual InfiniBand/iWARP network. The OFA software stack is open-sourced and Linux-based. The OpenFabrics Alliance is driving towards a single, unified stack to deliver an enterprise-class, transport-independent software solution for high-performance computing. SCinet exhibitors will include AMD, Ames Laboratory, Appro, ASUS, Chelsio, Cisco, Cluster File Systems, Fujitsu, Fulcrum, Hewlett-Packard, HLRS, Intel, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Mellanox, NetEffect, NNSA, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Qlogic Corporation, Sandia National Laboratories, Sun Microsystems, Tyan Computer, Voltaire, and XNet. Among the notable demonstrations planned for SCinet is an urban-planning simulation from the University of Stuttgart’s High-Performance Computing Center (HLRS). The simulation utilizes a model of an urban area to study wind flow between buildings as they are rearranged in the architectural planning process. A camera tracks the re-arrangement of buildings in real time and a computational model recalculates wind flows and displays new visualizations. Another significant demonstration will be a multi-protocol fabric storage demonstration by System Fabric Works. The demo will include the SCSI remote protocol (SRP), iSCSI over RDMA (iSER), NFS-RDMA, and a distributed, parallel file system (LUSTRE).