IBTA Blog

Recently, there has been a lot of conversation around InfiniBand. Members of the IBTA often take our knowledge of InfiniBand technology for granted, which is why we are happy to see more exploratory discussion and education conversations happening. If you’re interested in finding out more about InfiniBand the IBTA has a number of resources for you to check out, including a product roadmap, put together by the IBTA’s members.

Additionally, we wanted to share a recent blog post by Oracle’s Neeraj Gupta, which succinctly introduces the InfiniBand technology to those who may be unfamiliar with it.

Looking forward to more discussion and education on InfiniBand in the coming weeks.

Brian Sparks and Skip Jones
IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chairs

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Recently, QLogic Corporation sold Intel Corporation the QLogic InfiniBand business unit. QLogic continues its focus and expansion of its Ethernet product-line, as well as RoCE and iWARP protocols, amongst others, over Ethernet. QLogic remains committed to its close relationships and positions within the IBTA.

Skip Jones
IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chair

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As we begin 2012, the InfiniBand Trade Association is not only looking back on our successes in 2011, but also mapping out our areas for growth in the coming year. In 2011, the IBTA:

• Continued to move toward Exascale level computing
• Welcomed new members
• Witnessed the world’s first FDR 56Gb/s InfiniBand demonstration at ISC’11
• Plugged in our members at a Plugfest
• Hosted a booth, gave presentations and showed a “world’s first” at SC11
• Kicked off a webinar series

And this is just a slice of 2011!

Exciting things are to come in 2012 including: an update to our minibook, more discussions/events around RoCE, and so much more. As we look to the future of InfiniBand, we want to broaden the InfiniBand story beyond the HPC into the enterprise, highlighting real-life deployments and showcasing the great work of our members. We know various market-verticals utilize InfiniBand in their storage solutions, such as financial services, cloud computing and manufacturing, and this year we plan to increase the visibility of these solutions by reaching out to you, our members, and spreading your success stories.

We look forward to the year ahead with the IBTA and the continued support and participation of our members.

Happy New Year!

Brian Sparks and Skip Jones

IBTA MWG Chairs

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With the SC11 show less than a week away, we at 3M are gearing up and getting excited about what we have to share with the IBTA community. The high-speed twin axial cable and active optical cable (AOC) teams haven’t wasted any time by quickly identifying ways to contribute to the working groups and working to bring the best of 3M processes and innovation to the table. Coupled with access to IBTA’s resources, our support and rapidly growing portfolio of high-speed products will continue to expand and evolve.

This week, our 3M engineers are currently at IBTA Plugfest #20 with a full suite of complementary copper and fiber products for FDR, QDR and DDR rates, ranging in lengths from 0.5 meters up to 100 meters. And this momentum continues as we head into SC11.

3M is a sponsor of the IBTA/OFA booth, where we’ll be showcasing our various high-speed products for the HPC segment. What we have to offer in this space is truly differentiated and we believe can meet the most demanding of our customers’ needs.

For example, our line of copper QSFP+ assemblies are made with 3M^TM Twin Axial Cable technology, which lets the cable assembly easily bend and fold, allowing the cable to achieve a very small bend radius (2.5mm) with little to no impact on electrical performance.

The cable is lightweight and low profile (flat ribbon format) as well, and together with its unique flexibility, enables very efficient routing and improved airflow. Imagine folding the cable at a right angle right off the backshell where it exits the switch. Honestly, it’s a bit hard to envision without seeing it in action, so check out the cable and its capabilities on our YouTube page!

We’ll also be leveraging our presence at SC11 to showcase our AOC assemblies - one of the lowest power AOCs available on the market. Up there in flexibility with the 3M Twin Ax assemblies, our AOCs utilize a low-loss, bend-insensitive fiber, meaning the flexibility and high-performance benefits of 3M copper QSFP+ assemblies extends to the fiber side, as well.

These and other 3M cables will be put to the test in the 40 Gbps RDMA live demonstration within the IBTA/OFA booth. So, if you’re going to be at SC11, the demo should not be missed as it’s an extraordinary 40Gbps RDMA demo over this kind of distance… 6,000 miles, further than a trip from Seattle to Paris!

3M will be in Seattle all week during SC11 with a full agenda, so make sure you stop by the IBTA/OFA booth and check out our latest technologies. We’ll also be meeting with customers one-on-one in our meeting suite at the Grand Hyatt. The countdown is on and we look forward to seeing you at the show. Feel free to e-mail us for more information or to schedule time to chat at SC11.

Shalou Dhamija, sdhamija@3m.com

Jeff Bullion, jbullion@3m.com

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With less than two weeks until SC11, there’s lots of buzz around the forthcoming November release of the TOP500 list. Will Japan’s K supercomputer stay at the top? Where will China’s Sunway Bluelight place? How many systems with GPUs will we see?

The TOP500 list plays into SC11’s unofficial theme of Big Data. Nicole Hemsoth of HPCwire, released an article last week providing highlights of what you can expect to see at SC11. Nicole sites John Johnson, conference chair, who says that this year the supercomputing community is “being called upon to rise to the data challenge and develop methods for dealing with the exponential growth of data and strategies for analyzing and storing large data sets.”

Nicole goes on to highlight a number of presentations and sessions being given at SC11 focused on the problems and new developments spawned by Big Data and technical or scientific computing.

The technical working groups of the IBTA and OFA are all about addressing the problems and new developments spawned by data challenges in high performance computing - and translating those technologies into meaningful solutions for the enterprise data center.

We have joined forces with several member companies as well as SC11’s SCinet and Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and will be showcasing a “world’s first” demonstration of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocols over a 40 Gbps WAN. Watch here for more details to be released this Monday, Nov. 14.

We will also be featuring presentations from member companies on a full range of topics detailed on this site.

Be sure to add the IBTA/OFA #6010 to your list of must-see booths at the show and watch this space for live updates from the show.

Brian Sparks

IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chair

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In September, I had the privilege of working with my friend and colleague, Paul Grun of System Fabric Works (SFW) on the first webinar in a four-part series, “Why I/O is Worth a Fresh Look,” presented by InfiniBand Trade Association on September 23.

The IBTA Fall Webinar Series is part of a planned outreach program led by the IBTA to expand InfiniBand technology to new areas where its capabilities may be especially useful. InfiniBand is well-accepted in the High-Performance Community (HPC), but the technology can be just as beneficial in “mainstream” Enterprise Data Centers (EDC). The webinar series addresses the role of remote direct memory access (RDMA) technologies, such as InfiniBand and RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), in the EDC, highlighting the rising importance of I/O technology in the on-going transformation of modern data centers. We know that broadening into EDC is a difficult task for several reasons, including the fact that InfiniBand could be viewed as a “disruptive” technology, not based on the familiar Ethernet transport, and therefore requires new components in the EDC. The benefits are certainly there, but so are the challenges, hence the difficulty of our task.

Like all new technologies, one of our challenges is educating those who are not familiar with InfiniBand and challenging them to look at their current systems differently – just as our first part in this webinar series suggests - taking a fresh look at I/O. In this first webinar, we took on the task of reexamining I/O and assessing genuine advancements in I/O, specifically InfiniBand and making case for how this technology should be considered when improving your data center. We believe the developments in the InfiniBand world over the last decade are not well-known to EDC managers, or at least not well understood.

I am very happy with the result, and the first webinar really set the stage for the next three webinars which dive into the nuts and bolts of this technology and give practical information on how this technology can be implemented and improve your data center.

During the webinar we answered several questions, but one in particular, I felt we did not spend enough time discussing due to time limitations. The attendee asked, “How will interoperability in the data center be assured? The results from the IBTA plugfests are less than impressive. Will this improve with the next generation FDR product?”

First, this question requires a little explanation, because it uses terminology and implies knowledge outside of the webinar itself. There is testing of InfiniBand components which takes place jointly between the IBTA and OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL). We test InfiniBand components for compliance to the InfiniBand specification and for interoperability with other compliant InfiniBand components.

In the opinion of IBTA and OFA members, vendors and customers alike, interoperability must be verified with a variety of vendors and their products. However, that makes the testing much more difficult and results in lower success rates than if a less demanding approach were to be taken. The ever-increasing data rates also put additional demands on cable vendors and InfiniBand Channel Adapter and Switch vendors.

The real world result of our testing is a documented pass rate of about 90%, and a continuing commitment to do better.

What this means in real world terms is that the InfiniBand community has achieved the most comprehensive and strictest compliance and interoperability program in the industry. This fact, in and of itself, is probably the strongest foundational element that justifies our belief that InfiniBand can and should be considered for adoption in the mainstream EDC, with complete confidence as to its quality, reliability and maturity.

If you were unable to attend the webinar, be sure to check out the recorded webinar and download the presentation slides here. We’re looking forward to the next webinar (The Practical Approach to Applying InfiniBand in Your Data Center, taking place October 21) in the series which will dig more deeply into how this technology can be integrated into the data center and get into the meat of this technology. I look forward to your participation in the remaining webinars. There’s a lot we can accomplish together, and it starts with this basic understanding of the technology and how it can help you reach your company’s goals.

Jim Ryan
Chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance

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As part of its new training initiative, The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is holding a “Writing Application Programs for RDMA using OFA Software” class this January 19-20, 2011 at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab (UNH-IOL). If you are an application developer skilled in C programming and familiar with sockets, but with little or no experience programming with OpenFabrics Software, this class is the perfect opportunity to develop your RDMA expertise.

“Writing Application Programs for RDMA using OFA Software” immediately prepares you for writing application programs using RDMA. The class includes 8 hours of classroom work and 8 hours in the lab on Wednesday and Thursday, January 19 and 20. **Attendees enrolled by Dec. 24 will receive a FREE pass and rentals to Loon Mountain for skiing on Friday, January 21.**

Software Forge is a member of the IBTA and is helping drive this very first RDMA class. More information is available at www.openfabrics.org/training. Feel free to contact me with questions as well.

Regards,

Rupert Dance

rsdance@soft-forge.com

Member, IBTA’s Compliance and Interoperability Working Group

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