SCIENCE

The OpenFabrics Alliance announced dates for the 2012 OFA International Workshop: March 25-28, 2012 in Monterey, CA. The OpenFabrics Alliance will be holding its 2012 OFA International Workshop from March 25-28, 2012 in Monterey, CA. The multi-day event will be focused on the strategic opportunities for the OFA and development efforts around OFED, and will include an assessment of the state of the Alliance, industry expert opinions and direction and breakout sessions from leading solution providers and OEMs discussing customer requirements and deployments.

"At the 2011 OFA Workshop, it was evident that there are tremendous growth opportunities available for OFED - and OFA member companies ready to tackle the development efforts," said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. "We look forward to reconnecting with everyone at the 2012 event. Our research studies continue to show a reliance on mixed interconnect environments that blend standards with performance, which matches well with the capabilities OFED is targeting."

The 2012 OFA International Workshop is open to anyone with the desire to provide collaborative input into the direction and mechanics of OFED; non-OFA members welcome.

More information on the upcoming workshop, as well as presentations and videos from the 2011 event, are available. Early bird registration for 2012 will open this fall.

OFED Adoption Increasing
Worldwide adoption and deployment of OFED with all Linux distributions and Windows is increasing. OFED is being utilized in the majority (>60 percent) of the top 100 systems in the recently announced TOP500 list (top500.org) which ranks the world's most powerful computers. OFED helps RDMA-based networks provide computing efficiencies as high as 96 percent and latencies as low as 1 microsecond, and supports speeds up to 56Gb/s for InfiniBand and 40Gb/s for Ethernet. OFED also reduces data center power consumption up to 50 percent.

OFED is the high-performance networking API of choice, supporting all major RDMA protocols - InfiniBand, iWARP and RoCE - enabling the software to be deployed in a variety of business, research and scientific environments that require highly efficient networks, storage connectivity and parallel computing. Currently the market is seeing significant speed increases with the availability of FDR InfiniBand with link speeds of 14Gb/s per lane, or 56Gb/s per 4 lanes, and the increasing adoption of 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet.

OFED is free and available as a direct download from openfabrics.org, comes included in enterprise Linux distributions as well as Microsoft Windows, and is available from substantially all the major server, network and storage vendors worldwide.