New Types of Memory, their support in Linux, and how to use them via RDMA

Christoph Lameter from Jump Trading LLC gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “Recently new types of memory have shown up like HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), Optane, 3DXpoint, NVDIMM, NVME and various “nonvolatile” types memory. This talk gives a brief rundown on what is available and gives some example on how the vendors enable the actual use of this memory in the operating system (f.e. DAX and filesystems) and then show how an application would make use of this memory. In particular then we will be looking at what considerations are important for the use of RDMA to those memory devices.”

Intel’s Bill Magro Presents: Software Foundation for High-Performance Fabrics in the Cloud

Bill Magro from Intel gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Data Analytics workloads in the cloud are being fed by a deluge of data emanating from the Internet-connected population or people and things. This talk highlights the broadening role of OpenFabrics, in general, and the Open Fabrics Interface, in particular, to rise to the challenge of meeting the emerging requirements and become the software foundation for high-performance cloud fabrics.”

Bill Magro from Intel to Keynote OpenFabrics Workshop

Bill Magro of Intel Corporation will kick off the OpenFabrics Workshop with a keynote speech, “Software Foundation for High-Performance Fabrics in the Cloud.” The event takes place April 9-13 in Boulder, Colorado. “This talk will highlight the broadening role of OpenFabrics, in general, and the Open Fabrics Interface, in particular, to rise to the challenge of meeting the emerging requirements and become the software foundation for high-performance cloud fabrics.”

OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop 2018 – An Emphasis on Fabric Community Collaboration

In this special guest feature, Parks Fields and Paul Grun from the OpenFabrics Alliance write that the upcoming OFA Workshop in Boulder is an excellent opportunity to collaborate on the next generation of network fabrics. “Come join the community in Boulder this year to lend your voice to shaping the direction of fabric technology in big ways or small, or perhaps just to listen and learn about the latest trends coming down the pike, or to pick up tips and tricks to make you more effective in your daily job.”

A Recap of the 2017 OpenFabrics Workshop

The 13th Annual OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Workshop wrapped at the end of March with a look toward the future. The annual gathering, held this year in Austin, Texas, was devoted to advancing cutting edge networking technology through the ongoing collaborative efforts of OpenFabrics Software (OFS) producers and users. With a record 130+ attendees, the 2017 Workshop expanded on the OFA’s commitment to being an open organization by hosting an engaging Town Hall discussion and an At Large Board election, filling two newly added director seats for current members.

Video: Advancing Open Fabrics Interfaces

Sean Hefty from Intel presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “With its initial release two years ago, libfabric advanced the state of fabric software interfaces. One of the promises of OFI was extensibility: adapting to increased demands of fabric services from applications. This session explores the first major enhancements to the libfabric API in response to user demands and learnings.”

Managing Node Configuration with 1000s of Nodes

Ira Weiny from Intel presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “Individual node configuration when managing 1000s or 10s of thousands of nodes in a cluster can be a daunting challenge. Two key daemons are now part of the rdma-core package which aid the management of individual nodes in a large fabric: IBACM and rdma-ndd.”

Video: InfiniBand Virtualization

“Infiniband Virtualization allows a single Channel Adapter to present multiple transport endpoints that share the same physical port. To software, these endpoints are exposed as independent Virtual HCAs (VHCAs), and thus may be assigned to different software entities, such as VMs. VHCAs are visible to Subnet Management, and are managed just like physical HCAs. We will cover the Virtualization model, management, addressing modes, and discuss deployment considerations.”

Building Efficient HPC Clouds with MCAPICH2 and RDMA-Hadoop over SR-IOV IB Clusters

Xiaoyi Lu from Ohio State University presented this talk at the Open Fabrics Workshop. “Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology has been steadily gaining momentum for high performance interconnects such as InfiniBand. SR-IOV can deliver near native performance but lacks locality-aware communication support. This talk presents an efficient approach to building HPC clouds based on MVAPICH2 and RDMA-Hadoop with SR-IOV.”

GEN-Z: An Overview and Use Cases

Greg Casey from Dell EMC presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “This session will focus on the new Gen-Z memory-semantic fabric. The speaker will show the audience why Gen-Z is needed, how Gen-Z operates, what is expected in first products that employ Gen-Z, and encourage participation in finalizing the Gen-Z specifications. Gen-Z will be connecting components inside of servers as well as connecting servers with pools of memory, storage, and acceleration devices through a switch environment.”