INDUSTRY

The InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) and the OpenIB Alliance announced the successful conclusion of the second workshop focused on market and technology updates in addition to open-source software development discussion. Over 180 attendees participated in tracks on Linux kernel support, Windows stack development, and applications that showcased the mass market appeal of OpenIB's advancement of fabric technology. The unique event combined open-source software developers with leading server and storage OEMs; enterprise software vendors; and government, financial and corporate end users. This formula continues to foster innovation and has enabled InfiniBand to become the featured performance fabric for supercomputing and performance business applications. OpenIB continues this momentum at Supercomputing 2005 (Nov. 12-18 in Seattle, Wash.) where SCINet, a live network connecting upwards of 30 exhibitors, will be running the OpenIB, Linux-based InfiniBand software stack. "InfiniBand cluster solutions continue to deliver unmatched price/performance benefits for parallel processing applications that demand world-class computing and storage I/O performance," said Matt Leininger, computational scientist of Sandia National Laboratories. "Matching this value proposition with OpenIB's efforts to develop robust Linux, Windows and virtualization support completes the InfiniBand ecosystem with all the pieces necessary for mass market deployment." The mass market appeal of InfiniBand was echoed at the workshop by the following: -- Leading Wall Street firms shared their deployment strategies and highlighted InfiniBand server clusters in production usage today -- On the storage front, vendors continue to develop and promote native InfiniBand storage products driven by financial, clustered database, and performance computing applications -- Leading database software vendors stressed InfiniBand's importance for clustered database deployment, with key market drivers coming from the retail and financial sector -- Data presented showed the total install base of InfiniBand exceed 1 million ports by the end of 2005 Proceedings from the workshop are located at its Web site.