ACADEMIA

New OpenFabrics Software (OFS) User Community Includes Users from Enterprise Data Centers, High Frequency Trading, High Performance SuperComputing, National Labs and Universities

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has welcomed more than 40 attendees last week for its inaugural “User Day 2012” event, August 6-7, as the initial formation of an OpenFabrics Software (OFS) user community. The User Day, hosted by Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, IL, provided OFS/OFED users with a new forum to share their knowledge, experience, and learn from each other tools and techniques for managing and operating their RDMA fabrics. This new community will allow users of RDMA technologies to share resources that will help them fully maximize the performance of their Cloud and Enterprise Data Centers and High Performance SuperComputing Clusters.

During the two-day event, attendees participated in a variety of discussions including:

InfiniBand: Users shared experiences on how to understand fabric topologies, set up application routing, and the range of tools for efficient management and real-time operations.
Fabric Topologies: Users discussed switch fabric connections, including fat tree, multi-dimensional toruses, hypercubes and meshes.
Subnet Management and Tools: Users shared approaches on diagnosing fabric events and discussed ways to use the tools on the OFA cluster located at UNH-IOL, with real-time results.
RDMA: Users exchanged examples of RDMA use in real-world applications and also exchanged ideas on how to make it easy to use as well as optimize performance and of RDMA.
“Our goal for this first User Day event was to help foster an interactive, face-to-face community of OFS users and adopters, allowing them to share their experiences with deploying and managing networks that support RDMA,” said Jim Ryan, Chairman of the Board, OFA. “Attendees at the User Day event were very excited about the creation of such a community, and we expect the user group to grow through networking among the participants and future User Day events.”

Susan Coulter, HPC Network Administrator at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was instrumental in the success of this year’s OFA User Day and will be leading the organization of the next User Day. “The enthusiastic turn out at this year’s User Day was very encouraging,” said Coulter. “The different levels of knowledge and experience exhibited by the attendees will go a long way towards fostering a user-grown and led community. We believe this community will continue to expand as RDMA adoption continues throughout the world for in HPC, Enterprise Data Centers and both Public and Private Cloud services.”

To enable interactions between users of OpenFabrics Software, whether new or experienced, the Alliance has created a user mail-list - users@lists.openfabrics.org. Registration for this list is at http://lists.openfabrics.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/users.

For the next users event, the OFA and IBM Zurich Research are hosting an OpenFabrics EMEIA User/Developer workshop in Ruschlikon, Switzerland on September 24, 25 with the goal of bringing together the users from Europe, Africa and the Middle East to form an OFA EMEIA user community and to foster their participation in the user mail-list.