SCIENCE

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has announced a new training initiative aimed at application developers, system architects and IT managers in the enterprise datacenter, financial services and High Performance Computing (HPC). The OFA training initiative will provide an introduction to, as well as hands-on experience with, OpenFabrics Software and related software tools. Several courses are being planned for next year; two are being announced at this time:

• "Introduction to OpenFabrics Software Mini-Course" -- available upon request at your location or the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab
   
• "Programming with OpenFabrics Software" -- January 19-20, 2011, from 8:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab

"OpenFabrics Software, traditionally used in HPC, is approachable, usable and beneficial to the enterprise datacenter," said Jim Ryan, manager at Intel Corporation and chair of the OpenFabrics Alliance. "This new OFA training initiative highlights the value that OpenFabrics Software brings to end-user organizations, including high CPU efficiency, reduced energy consumption and reduced rack-space requirements."

Registration for courses, as well as information on prerequisites and posted syllabi, is available online at www.openfabrics.org/training. The Programming course costs $1,995 per person.

"Introduction to OpenFabrics Software Mini-Course" is designed to give developers, system integrators and managers an overview of the benefits of OpenFabrics technologies and introduce them to OpenFabrics Software and Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) concepts.

"Programming with OpenFabrics Software" is designed to provide experienced application developers who are new to OpenFabrics Software with the knowledge and experience they need for writing application programs using RDMA. The lessons will provide practical, hands-on knowledge of the OFA stack and focus on the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) API, RDMA concepts and common design patterns. By meeting at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab, attendees will have the opportunity to run tests on a full-fledged OFA cluster in a working HPC environment.

The initial training courses will be led by Dr. Robert D. Russell, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Russell has been an esteemed member of the University of New Hampshire faculty for more than 30 years and has worked with the InterOperability Laboratory's iSCSI (Internet Small Computer Systems Interconnect) consortium, iWARP (the family of protocols for remote direct memory access over TCP/IP) consortium, and the OpenFabrics Interoperability Logo Program.