OpenFabrics Alliance Announces Featured Speakers for Annual International Workshop Taking Place April 3-6, 2011 in Monterey, CA

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), an open source community focused on developing the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED^TM) for high-performance networking applications, today announced speakers for its 2011 International Workshop being held from April 3-6 in Monterey, CA. The workshop is focused on users’ experience to date and their future requirements for OFED. Companies and organizations presenting include Chelsio, ENKI, Google, IBM, Intel, Intersect360, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Mellanox Technologies, Mercury Computer Systems, Microsoft, NASA Ames, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ohio State University, Oracle, QLogic, Sandia National Laboratory, Simula Research Laboratory, System Fabric Works and VMware. Program and agenda are available online at www.openfabrics.org/workshop.

Featured speakers and topics are as follows:

• Opening keynote: "The Challenges and Opportunities of OpenFabrics in the Cloud," Michael R. Marty, senior software engineer, Google
• “InfiniBand Scalability Roadblocks,” Stephen Poole, Computer Science and Mathematics Division chief scientist, director of special programs National Center for Computational Sciences Division (OLCF) chief architect at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• “Exascale I/O Requirements,” Jason Hick, storage group leader, NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• “OFED Adoption Inhibitors in the Enterprise Data Center,” Stewart Tate, senior technical staff member, IBM Silicon Valley Laboratory
• “Scaling out the Data Center,” Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle
• “OFED in High Performance Computing and Beyond,” Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research

“The OFA workshop is a networking opportunity for OFED users, product managers and developers to share their experiences with OFED and discuss what we need to accomplish in the next year,” said Tom Stachura, chair of the OpenFabrics Alliance International Workshop. “Leading architects, developers, technologists and end users from various disciplines will come together and discuss the use of OFED in high performance computing and broader markets such as cloud computing, databases and enterprise data centers.”

The workshop will explore new horizons for OFED, including:

• Breaking through the Exascale barrier
• Defining OFED for the Cloud
• Enabling unprecedented efficiencies

The OFA delivers its code – free, tested and reliable – to kernel.org for further distribution by all the Linux distributors, tier one OEMs (computer systems and storage) and networking manufacturers.

OFED is used every day in business (messaging, high frequency trading, business intelligence, etc.), research, scientific and sensor environments. OFED provides high performance computing sites and enterprise data centers with efficiency, flexibility and investment protection as computing evolves towards applications and transports that require extreme speeds, massive scalability and utility-class reliability, and as networks scale up to 40, 56 and 100 gigabits per second.

At the application level, OFED offers programming interfaces (APIs) for sockets data movement, access to SAN and NAS storage, databases, and parallel computing clustering. OFED is available for Linux and Windows and it enables four industry standard interconnects – InfiniBand, iWARP, RapidIO, RoCE – delivering computing efficiencies as high as 90 percent and end-to-end latency as low as sub-1 microsecond. In addition, OFED transports can work globally over wide area networks running on SONET/SDH, ITU-T G.709 OTN or Ethernet.

Online Registration Available

The 2011 OpenFabrics Alliance International Workshop is open to anyone with the desire to learn about OFED, to meet its developers, to collaborate in its governance or use it in products and IT infrastructure. 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 welcome.

Online registration is open and early bird pricing ($100 discount per person) is available until March 7. More information on hotel, pricing and registration is available at: www.openfabrics.org/workshop.

Event sponsors include: AMD, Chelsio, Mellanox Technologies and Oracle. Additional sponsorship opportunities are available for companies that would like to make their capabilities known to users and other OFA members. 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 interoperability testing to ensure all releases meet multi-vendor enterprise requirements for security, usability and reliability. For more information about the OFA, visit www.openfabrics.org.