INDUSTRY

The OpenIB Alliance today announced that it will host the largest multi-vendor InfiniBand fabric ever deployed at this year's Supercomputing 2005 conference (SC5), Nov. 12-18 in Seattle, Wash. (Washington State Convention and Trade Center). More than 30 exhibitors consisting of InfiniBand infrastructure equipment vendors, server and storage vendors, software vendors, and research and university groups are expected to participate and run the OpenIB, Linux- and Windows-based InfiniBand software stack. This will be the first multi-vendor interoperability test of OpenIB in a cluster, campus and wide area network (WAN). The live InfiniBand fabric will connect participating booths in the exhibition area via fiber InfiniBand links, providing a powerful infrastructure for exhibitors to demonstrate the advantages InfiniBand technology delivers including: clustered computing for high performance computing applications; peer-to-peer processing; high performance access to native InfiniBand storage resources in StorCloud; and long distance connectivity ranging from booth-to-booth within the convention center to a WAN across the continental United States. "OpenIB and this team of vendors are literally building an 'InfiniBand data center' at SC5," said Bill Boas, computer scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. "Participating companies will not only be able to experience the unmatched price/performance benefits InfiniBand technology brings to clustered applications and storage I/O, but they will gain valuable experience with standard OpenIB software in a multi-vendor environment." Participating organizations including Cisco, Intel, Mellanox, SilverStorm, Voltaire, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NASA Ames, NNSA, Obsidian Research and others will use the fabric to demonstrate the interoperability and performance of their solutions with InfiniBand technology and the OpenIB software. Moreover, the fabric provides an opportunity for exhibitors to test their solutions in a multi-vendor environment. SC5 exhibitors that would like to connect to the OpenIB fabric can sign up on the SCinet connection request Website at its Web site. Sign-ups for a guaranteed connection will be accepted until Oct. 1, 2005. Additional information about the OpenIB network at SC5 is available at its Web site.