“InfiniBand’s inclusion in the Linux distributions makes its usage more attractive to IT managers,” said Jim Ryan, of Intel and chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance, “and will continue to drive its rapid adoption in major markets such as financial services, manufacturing, oil and gas, life sciences, and all aspects research and government computing.”

The inclusion of OpenIB InfiniBand software in Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server aids in gaining control over network fabric while providing a foundation on which to deploy Xen virtualization for large multi-node clusters, according to Novell’s Jeff Hawkins.

“By increasing application throughput and allocating network bandwidth by workload, Novell and Open IB enable organizations to improve server utilization and create a flexible and responsive data center,” said Hawkins.

Founded in 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance, the OpenFabrics Alliance dedicates itself to developing “transport agnostic” open source software for RDMA fabric technologies. The primary focus is furthering the development of Linux-based InfiniBand software, recently expanding that focus to support iWARP.

The group is comprised of all-star technology vendors and end-user organizations like AMD, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Linux Networx, LSI Logic, NetEffect, Oracle, Rackable Systems, and Sun Microsystems.

With the inclusion of the OpenRDMA Project, the Alliance is working towards the goal of a single software stack for downstream Linux distributions that is transport agnostic with support for RDMA over InfiniBand and Ethernet. In addition, the expanded transport agnostic charter is intended to enable the inclusion of other RDMA fabric technologies as they come to market.

“The OpenRDMA Project is committed to offering its existing code base, along with hardware specific drivers, for joint development under an OpenFabrics stack that is accepted by kernel.org.,” said Venkata Jagana, IBM, Linux Technology Center and co-founder and leader of the OpenRDMA project. “Support for a converged software stack makes it easier and less costly for customers to run applications across different RDMA fabrics.”

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Under the terms of an agreement between the companies, Voltaire InfiniBand solutions can be resold as part of HP offerings for high-performance technical computing (HPTC) customers worldwide.

InfiniBand is a server interconnect and I/O technology that delivers high performance and scalability to server clusters. As an open industry standard, InfiniBand is widely used in high-performance computing clusters for scientific and engineering applications, the most rapidly growing segment of high-performance computing (HPC). Industry observers have linked increased InfiniBand adoption with the rapid growth of Linux, which enables powerful, yet cost-effective HPC solutions for scientific and technical computing applications.

According to IDC, HP is the leader in the Linux server market, which reached more than $900 million in factory revenue in the second quarter of 2004, representing 48.9% year-over-year growth.

Voltaire offers a complete family of InfiniBand solutions including the Voltaire ISR 9288, the industry’s highest port density, most scalable InfiniBand switch for building high-performance computing clusters and grids ranging from tens to thousands of nodes.

“We’re very excited to be selected by HP as an InfiniBand partner,” said Ronnie Kenneth, CEO and chairman, Voltaire. “Users of clustered Linux solutions are looking to increase the efficiency, performance, and utilization of their systems, without a lot of added complexity and expense. Today’s announcement means that together with HP we can deliver these benefits to these important customers.”

Customers have already benefited from Voltaire’s work with HP. Shanghai University recently completed an installation consisting of 174 HP ProLiant DL360 servers and InfiniBand solutions from Voltaire. CEA is using Voltaire InfiniBand interconnect solutions to power a 60 node cluster of HP ProLiant DL585 4-way Opteron servers.

“InfiniBand is a strategic technology for HP’s Linux cluster offerings and our customers continue to ask for the technology,” said Ty Rabe, director of research and development, HPC Division, HP. “Under the agreement with Voltaire, we will be able to offer our customers InfiniBand configure-to-order Linux cluster solutions using low- and high-port count switches that deliver impressive performance and scalability, yet are based on affordable, standards-based technology.”

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