This article needs additional citations for verification .(November 2022) |
Formation | June 2004 |
---|---|
Type | Non-profit organization |
Purpose | Industry trade group |
Website | http://www.openfabrics.org/ |
The OpenFabrics Alliance is a non-profit organization that promotes remote direct memory access (RDMA) switched fabric technologies for server and storage connectivity. These high-speed data-transport technologies are used in high-performance computing facilities, in research and various industries.
The OpenFabrics Alliance aims to develop open-source software that supports the three major RDMA fabric technologies: InfiniBand, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and iWARP. The software includes two packages, one that runs on Linux and FreeBSD and one that runs on Microsoft Windows. The alliance worked with two large Linux distributors—SUSE and Red Hat—as well as Microsoft on compatibility with their operating systems.
Founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance, the organization originally developed an InfiniBand software stack for Linux. Initial funding for the Alliance was provided by the United States Department of Energy. The alliance released the first version of the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) in 2005.
In 2005 the OpenIB Alliance announced support for Microsoft Windows. In 2006, the organization again expanded its charter to include support for iWARP, which is a transport technology that competes with InfiniBand. At that time the alliance changed its name to the OpenFabrics Alliance. Subsequent releases have added support for iWARP and Windows.
In 2011, OFED stack was ported to FreeBSD and included in FreeBSD 9.
A community of developers from hardware manufacturers, software vendors, system integrators, government agencies and academia continue [update] to work on OFED. The OpenFabrics Alliance provides architectures, software repositories, interoperability tests, bug databases, workshops, and BSD- and GPL-licensed code to facilitate development.
The OFED stack includes software drivers, core kernel-code, middleware, and user-level interfaces. It offers a range of standard protocols, including IPoIB (IP over InfiniBand [1] ), SDP, SRP, iSER, RDS and DAPL (the Direct Access Programming Library). It also supports many other protocols, including various MPI implementations, and it supports many file systems, including Lustre and NFS over RDMA.
On June 25, 2007, the OpenFabrics Alliance announced the OFA-UNH-IOL Logo Program in partnership with the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory. The program enables manufacturers of InfiniBand and iWARP products to test and certify that their products support the OpenFabrics software stack, and test their compatibility with other products.
The alliance sponsors interoperability events at the University of New Hampshire. The test scenarios are available to the public, as are the test results for all products that earn the logo. During interoperability events, all participating companies have the opportunity to observe all tests run on all products.
Corporate members of the OpenFabrics Alliance include Advanced Micro Devices, Appro, Broadcom, Cray Inc., Chelsio Communications, Cisco Systems, DataDirect Networks, Emulex, Flextronics, Hewlett Packard, Huawei, IBM, Intel, LSI Corporation, Mellanox Technologies, NetEffect, Neterion, NetApp, NetXen, Oracle Corporation, QLogic, RapidIO, Red Hat, Silicon Graphics, SuSE and System Fabric Works.
Research members include:
Consulting members include the Ethernet Alliance, the InfiniBand Trade Association, Lamprey Networks, Ohio State University, and the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory. In 2007, Credit Suisse became the first financial-services firm to join the alliance.
A network operating system (NOS) is a specialized operating system for a network device such as a router, switch or firewall.
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology. By 2014, it was the most commonly used interconnect in the TOP500 list of supercomputers, until about 2016.
NetApp, Inc. is an American hybrid cloud data services and data management company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has ranked in the Fortune 500 from 2012–2021. Founded in 1992 with an IPO in 1995, NetApp offers cloud data services for management of applications and data both online and physically.
In computing, remote direct memory access (RDMA) is a direct memory access from the memory of one computer into that of another without involving either one's operating system. This permits high-throughput, low-latency networking, which is especially useful in massively parallel computer clusters.
Altix is a line of server computers and supercomputers produced by Silicon Graphics, based on Intel processors. It succeeded the MIPS/IRIX-based Origin 3000 servers.
The IBM BladeCenter was IBM's blade server architecture, until it was replaced by Flex System in 2012. The x86 division was later sold to Lenovo in 2014.
The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) is a transport-agnostic protocol to support stream sockets over remote direct memory access (RDMA) network fabrics. SDP was originally defined by the Software Working Group (SWG) of the InfiniBand Trade Association. Originally designed for InfiniBand (IB), SDP is currently maintained by the OpenFabrics Alliance.
The University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL) is an independent test facility that provides interoperability and standards conformance testing for networking, telecommunications, data storage, and consumer technology products.
iWARP is a computer networking protocol that implements remote direct memory access (RDMA) for efficient data transfer over Internet Protocol networks. Contrary to some accounts, iWARP is not an acronym.
The iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER) is a computer network protocol that extends the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocol to use Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). RDMA is provided by either the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) with RDMA services (iWARP) that uses existing Ethernet setup and therefore no need of huge hardware investment, RoCE that does not need the TCP layer and therefore provides lower latency, or InfiniBand. It permits data to be transferred directly into and out of SCSI computer memory buffers without intermediate data copies and without much CPU intervention.
In computing the SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) is a protocol that allows one computer to access SCSI devices attached to another computer via remote direct memory access (RDMA). The SRP protocol is also known as the SCSI Remote Protocol. The use of RDMA makes higher throughput and lower latency possible than what is generally available through e.g. the TCP/IP communication protocol.
The Ethernet Alliance was incorporated in the US state of California in August 2005 and officially launched in January 2006 as a non-profit industry consortium to promote and support Ethernet. The objectives were to provide an unbiased, industry-based source of educational information; to ensure interoperability among disparate, standards-based components and systems; to support the development of standards that support Ethernet technology; and to bring together the Ethernet industry to collaborate on the future of the technology.
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The initialism NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCIe add-in cards, and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
In computing, Linux-IO (LIO) Target is an open-source implementation of the SCSI target that has become the standard one included in the Linux kernel. Internally, LIO does not initiate sessions, but instead provides one or more Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs), waits for SCSI commands from a SCSI initiator, and performs required input/output data transfers. LIO supports common storage fabrics, including FCoE, Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, iSCSI, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) and USB. It is included in most Linux distributions; native support for LIO in QEMU/KVM, libvirt, and OpenStack makes LIO also a storage option for cloud deployments.
RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or InfiniBand over Ethernet (IBoE) is a network protocol that allows remote direct memory access (RDMA) over an Ethernet network. It does this by encapsulating an InfiniBand (IB) transport packet over Ethernet. There are two RoCE versions, RoCE v1 and RoCE v2. RoCE v1 is an Ethernet link layer protocol and hence allows communication between any two hosts in the same Ethernet broadcast domain. RoCE v2 is an internet layer protocol which means that RoCE v2 packets can be routed. Although the RoCE protocol benefits from the characteristics of a converged Ethernet network, the protocol can also be used on a traditional or non-converged Ethernet network.
SCST is a GPL licensed SCSI target software stack. The design goals of this software stack are high performance, high reliability, strict conformance to existing SCSI standards, being easy to extend and easy to use. SCST does not only support multiple SCSI protocols but also supports multiple local storage interfaces and also storage drivers implemented in user-space via the scst_user driver.
Avnu Alliance is a consortium of member companies working together to create an interoperable ecosystem of low-latency, time-synchronized, highly reliable networking devices using the IEEE open standard, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and its Pro AV networking protocol, Milan. Avnu Alliance creates comprehensive certification programs to ensure interoperability of network devices. In the Professional Audio Video (AV) industry, Alliance member companies worked together to develop Milan: a standards-based, user-driven deterministic network protocol for professional media, that through certification, assures devices will work together at new levels of convenience, reliability, and functionality. Milan™ is a standards-based deterministic network protocol for real time media. Avnu Members may use the Avnu-certified or Milan-certified logo on devices that pass the conformance tests from Avnu. Not every device based on AVB or TSN is submitted for certification to the Avnu Alliance. The lack of the Avnu logo does not necessarily imply a device is incompatible with other Avnu-certified devices. The Alliance, in conjunction with other complimentary standards bodies and alliances, provides a united network foundation for use in professional AV, automotive, industrial control and consumer segments.
OrionVM Wholesale Pty Limited is an Australian infrastructure as a service provider and white-label cloud platform. Resellers present customers with a rebranded interface for deploying virtual machine instances, which are only billed for what their customers use. Cloud Harmony benchmarked the OrionVM Cloud Platform's InfiniBand-backed network storage as the world's fastest in 2011.
Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) was a high-performance communication architecture owned by Intel. It aims for low communication latency, low power consumption and a high throughput. Intel planned to develop technology based on this architecture for exascale computing.
SONiC is a free and open source network operating system based on Linux and developed by Microsoft and the Open Compute Project. SONiC includes the networking software components necessary for a fully functional L3 device and was designed to meet the requirements of a cloud data center. It allows cloud operators to share the same software stack across hardware from different switch vendors.