The annual workshop to focus on OFED's continued development, optimization and expansion in HPC clusters, big data and cloud computing data centers

March 1 — The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), a community that develops and supports the open sourced networking software stack for high-performance computing (HPC) clusters and mainstream server cloud data centers – OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED), today announced the theme for the annual 2012 OpenFabrics Alliance User and Developer Workshop being held March 25-28 in Monterey, Calif. The 2012 workshop sessions will focus on current users' experience and their future requirements for OFED including optimization and expansion in big data and cloud computing data centers.

A central contributor to this year's theme are sessions discussing the inclusion of OFED into Microsoft Windows 8 and SMB 2.2 and the adoption of RDMA technology to build an efficient, high-performing Microsoft Windows 8 server cloud. Other workshop sessions will cover the recent technological advancements using RDMA including virtualization, SSDs, new specialized PCIe bus protocols to utilize SSD's fullest potential, "big data" Hadoop storage clusters, parallel file systems and heterogeneous parallel computing.

Lead architects from some of the U.S. national laboratories supercomputers and the high-frequency trading market will also present the latest developments on RDMA's journey to Exascale computing as well as share their own advancements, obstacles they have encountered and lessons learned. The 2012 OFA User and Developer Workshop agenda is available at http://www.openfabrics.org/workshop. Early bird discounted registration for the workshop ends March 9.

"The OFA User and Developer Workshop allows OFED users, from CIO's, senior data center architects to mainstream network administrators, to gather in one room to share their experiences using OFED and ask how RDMA and OFED can help them achieve their business goals," said Chris Calandro, chair of the OpenFabrics Alliance User and Developer Workshop. "This year, we've designed the agenda to allow for more free-flowing discussions with panels led by leading architects, developers, technologists and end users from various vertical and horizontal markets to speak openly about their experiences and lessons learned using RDMA and OFED."

Companies and organizations presenting at the workshop include AMD, Chelsio, Cray, EMC, Fusion I/O, HP, Intel, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Mellanox, Microsoft, Myricom, NVIDIA, NASA, Ohio State University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), QLogic, Sandia, Software Forge, OCZ and VMware. Registration information and the workshop agenda are available online at http://www.openfabrics.org/workshop.

Online Registration Available

The workshop is open to anyone with the desire to provide collaborative input into the direction and mechanics of OFED including developers, technologists, supporters, end users and business professionals. In addition, this workshop is the annual opportunity for users of OFED – in products, clusters, data centers – to provide feedback to the OpenFabrics Alliance. Non-OFA members are welcome.

Online registration is open and early bird pricing ($100 discount per person) is available until Friday, March 9. More information on hotel, pricing and registration is available at: http://www.openfabrics.org/workshop.

For more information, contact Monterey@openfabrics.org.

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is a 501(c) (6) non-profit association that develops, tests, licenses and distributes the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) – multi-platform, open-source software for high-performance, low-latency and energy-efficient computing. OFED is used in business, research and scientific environments that require fast and efficient networks, storage connectivity and parallel computing. OFED is free and is included in major Linux distributions, as well as Microsoft Windows. In addition to distributing OFED, the OFA conducts training, workshops and interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multivendor enterprise requirements for security, usability and reliability. For more information about the OFA, visit http://www.openfabrics.org.

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Source: OpenFabrics Alliance