Linux.com

But there is no hiding the fact that Linux is the hottest OS for InfiniBand. That is where the alliance -- which includes Intel, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Engenio, Infinicon, Mellanox, and others -- will first focus its attention.

"Linux is basically where we see most of the demand," said Mellanox director of product marketing Thad Omura. "That's why our charter is a bulletproof stack for Linux."

The group, which also includes members Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Labs, said it will work to create a standard Linux operating system and database configuration, called a software stack, that will improve interoperability, reduce cost, and decrease integration time required to deploy IB with Linux. The stack will be open source, and while there is a fee to join as a Promoter -- like the founding members that serve as a steering group -- the OpenIB Alliance said others can contribute without any fee.

Omura said with almost every major HPC vendor now supporting it, as well as widespread acceptance in major research facilities and labs, InfiniBand has grown strong along with clustered supercomputing.

Testament to clustering's success came in the form of the latest Top500 Fastest Supercomputers List, which now includes more than 280 clustering systems, many of which use high-speed networking interconnect technology such as InfiniBand, and many of which use Linux.

Omura added that while the OpenIB Alliance will focus first on delivering the single IB stack for Linux, the companies and other members of the alliance would eventually like to see the stack incorporated into the Linux kernel. The alliance is planning to work with main Linux distributors Red Hat and Novell's SUSE, according to Omura.

Stretching InfiniBand the right way

Stan Skelton, senior director of strategic planning for Engenio (formerly LSI Logic Storage Systems), said the goal of the alliance is to have each of the different companies -- which also include Veritas, InfiniCon, Network Appliance, Topspin, and Voltaire -- focus on its own particular value add and avoid duplicating the I/O stack at the silicon, switch, management, application, or storage level.

"InfiniBand came out a couple of years ago, and it was a very attractive market for a number of applications," Skelton said. "Everybody tried to stretch it each way. Now it has come out of the curve of disillusionment and been focused on high-performance clusters as a high-performance system interconnect. And we're extending it to things like storage."

Skelton also said InfiniBand is growing beyond the high-performance market and gaining a foothold in more general computing with clustered Oracle or DB2 databases and similar clustered solutions, where tens of thousands of nodes make Linux the logical operating system.

"People are grabbing as many off-the-shelf components as possible and using them as a competitive weapon," Skelton said.

In addition to low cost, low latency, and high performance from IB on Linux, customers are also taking advantage of the ability to have a single wire or transport to cluster services with attached storage, according to Skelton, who said a number of Engenio's HPC customers will be prototyping the technology this summer.

Confidence, kernel, corporate

Intel initiative manager and OpenIB secretary Jim Ryan said in an email to NewsForge that the direct benefit of the group's effort and a single software stack for IB is interoperability of interconnect and cluster components from various hardware vendors.

"The indirect benefit is it should give IT managers and others considering IB more confidence in the future of IB because of interoperability and the efforts of OpenIB to get into Linux distributions and the kernel," Ryan said.

Ryan agreed that while InfiniBand is succeeding in specialized areas such as HPC, IB is also positioned to move increasingly into the corporate datacenter as initiatives like grid computing move forward, Oracle delivers native support for IB, and adoption of IB continues to grow.

Ryan, who indicated concrete plans for software releases are expected as the alliance gets to work, offered a little more detail on what the single stack for IB would look like.

"The OpenIB single stack draws from the existing software stacks delivered by IB [independent hardware vendors] IHVs and other contributors," Ryan said. "The difference is the OpenIB stack will consist of an overall blueprint or visions for the software stack components and identify the supplier of each component as well as those that will maintain and work on the code. Software will be contributed by other sources as well, but the initial definition comes from the Promoters [the initial alliance founding companies] within OpenIB."

Share    Print    Comments