Ted H. Kim's Weblog

Wednesday November 15, 2006

OpenFabrics

A while ago, I described RNICPI. I would have liked to have said it's taking over the world. But alas, that is not to be. I really did want RNICPI to succeed. After all, I am the co-chair of the group that authored it. Now, that is not to say there won't be some RNICPI implementations. I wish them luck.

But as far as Sun is concerned, we have decided that the industry momentum is increasingly behind the Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA). Now OFA was originally called OpenIB because of it's InfiniBand roots. And most of its software is still heavily influenced by that. But it also has iWARP support under development. There are some significant milestones still to come before OFA iWARP support can be considered mature, but it's coming along.

Now if you have been reading my blog, you know I am a Solaris developer. Folks familiar with OFA know it's based around Linux (and there is a Windows version too!). So there are various issues involved with leveraging OFA stuff for iWARP on Solaris and making it all work together. But that is what we are doing. And since it's SC06 time, I guess I shouldn't delay blogging about this any longer.

So there you have it. We are trying to take advantage of the growing interest in iWARP based on OFA code and interfaces. Many of the iWARP IHVs have OFA code internally or under development. We feel that OFA is going to become the de facto standard for iWARP software.

More on this story to come ...

Now I would be remiss if I didn't offer all the standard disclaimers. YMMV. I don't time travel. But who knows, I might still be right. :-)

Technorati Tags: iWARP

(2006-11-15 16:00:00.0) Permalink