Call for Sessions: OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop in March

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has published a Call for Sessions for its 16th annual OFA Workshop. “The OFA Workshop 2020 Call for Sessions encourages industry experts and thought leaders to help shape this year’s discussions by presenting or leading discussions on critical high-performance networking issues. Session proposals are being solicited in any area related to high performance networks and networking software, with a special emphasis on the topics for this year’s Workshop. In keeping with the Workshop’s emphasis on collaboration, proposals for Birds of a Feather sessions and panels are particularly encouraged.”

Video: Enabling Applications to Exploit SmartNICs and FPGAs

Sean Hefty and Venkata Krishnan from Intel gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. “Advances in Smart NIC/FPGA with integrated network interface allow acceleration of application-specific computation to be performed alongside communication. Participants will learn about the potential for Smart NIC/FPGA application acceleration and will have the opportunity to contribute application expertise and domain knowledge to a discussion of how Smart NIC/FPGA acceleration technology can bring individual applications into the Exascale era.”

Faster Fabrics Running Against Limits of the Operating System, the Processor, and the I/O Bus

Christopher Lameter from Jump Trading gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop in Austin. “In 2017 we got 100G fabrics, in 2018 200G fabrics and in 2019 it looks like 400G technology may be seeing a considerable amount of adoption. These bandwidth compete with and sometimes are higher than the internal bus speeds of the servers that are connected using these fabrics. I think we need to consider these developments and work on improving fabrics and the associated APIs so that ways to access these features become possible using vendor neutral APIs. It needs to be possible to code in a portable way and not to a vendor specific one.”