In this video from the 2016 OpenFabrics Workshop, Sean Hefty from Intel presents: Past, Present, and Future of OpenFabrics Interfaces.
OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) is a framework focused on exporting fabric communication services to applications. OFI is best described as a collection of libraries and applications used to export fabric services. The key components of OFI are: application interfaces, provider libraries, kernel services, daemons, and test applications. Libfabric is a core component of OFI. It is the library that defines and exports the user-space API of OFI, and is typically the only software that applications deal with directly. It works in conjunction with provider libraries, which are often integrated directly into libfabric.
“The first release of OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) software, libfabric, occurred in January of 2015. Since then, the number of fabrics and applications supported by OFI has increased, with considerable industry momentum building behind it. This talk discusses the current state of OFI, then speaks to the application requirements driving it forward. It will detail the fabrics supported by libfabric, identify applications which have ported to it, and outline future enhancements to the libfabric interfaces and architecture.”
