SCIENCE

The OpenFabrics Alliance has announced that more than 44 percent of the just-released TOP500 list of the most powerful computers in the world utilize OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) software for parallel computing, low-latency interconnects, and/or file-system operations. The OFA also announced dates and a new location for its 2011 OpenFabrics Alliance International Workshop; the event will be held April 3-6, 2011, in Monterey, Calif.

OFED is being utilized by 218 systems on the TOP500, up from 182 in November 2009. OFED is being utilized by the majority of the Top100 with 61 percent. OFED's optimization and performance capabilities provide systems with CPU efficiency as high as 96 percent. OpenFabrics software provides high-performance computing sites and enterprise data centers with flexibility and investment protection as computing evolves towards applications that require extreme speeds, massive scalability and utility-class reliability.

"OFED is experiencing growing adoption by vendors and users worldwide," said Jim Ryan, chair of the OFA. "The increased adoption we're seeing by systems on the TOP500 year to year validates the performance capabilities of OFED at the high end; we're also seeing increased deployments in the enterprise data center where OFED demonstrates those same high-bandwidth, low-latency and low-CPU-utilization benefits."

The TOP500 list is published twice a year and ranks the most powerful computers worldwide, providing valuable statistics for tracking trends in supercomputer performance and architectures.

OFA Announces Dates, New Location for 2011 International Workshop

The 2011 OpenFabrics Alliance International Workshop will be held April 3-6, 2011, in Monterey, Calif. This 7th annual international workshop will explore new directions for OFED, including:

• Breaking through the Exascale barrier
• Defining OFED for the Cloud
• Enabling unprecedented efficiencies

The workshop is open to anyone -- developers, technologists, supporters, end users, business professionals -- with the desire to provide collaborative input into the direction and mechanics of OFED. Non-members welcome.

OFA at SC10 This Week

This week, OFA is exhibiting at SC10 in New Orleans in booth #1161, featuring interactive demos and presentations. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)-based performance demos featuring OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED):

• Bay Microsystems: Extending InfiniBand Globally
• Chelsio & Intel: iWARP Interoperability – Robust, Proven Low Latency Ethernet Clustering
• Mellanox: 3D Real-Time Visualization over InfiniBand
• Obsidian: Long haul encrypted InfiniBand over 10Gb Ethernet
• System Fabric Works: Cloud Computing for HPC Applications

Additionally, Paul Grun, chief scientist at System Fabric Works and member of the OFA's steering committee, will be presenting a Birds of Feather on November 16 at 12:15 p.m. on the topic "RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) - Next Generation RDMA Network." The session will present the concept and theory of RoCE and include a panel discussion.