The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) annual Workshop is quickly approaching. Here’s a fast breaking update on the schedule and events being planned for this year.
The Workshop gets underway on Monday evening, April 9 at 6:00 p.m., and wraps up at noon on Friday, April 13. In between, it’s jam packed with opportunities to collaborate, learn, and network with others on the latest technology trends in advanced networks.
We’ve heard the requests from years past for more opportunities for networking and collaboration among attendees, and this year we’ve worked hard to deliver those opportunities. Beginning Monday evening, we’ll be holding a first ever OFA Think Tank designed to focus on a few Grand Challenge problems. The idea is to harness the combined mental horsepower of you, the Workshop attendees, to address these bleeding edge, but very real, issues. Stay tuned for a description of the Think Tank topics to be tackled this year.
We’ve also been aggressive this year in building ‘nests’ for our Birds of a Feather (BoF). A BoF is an ideal forum for gauging community interest in an emerging topic, disseminating information on it, and networking with others who share your interest in that topic. There will be several BoFs held at the Workshop this year on issues ranging from interoperability testing, to Remote Persistent Memory, to programming language extensions to support fabrics.
If that’s not enough, we’re organizing a ‘Meet the Experts’ session where you can spend time with recognized industry leaders in key topics related to fabrics and fabric technology for informal conversations and networking.
And all of that is built on top of the Technical Sessions that have always formed the heart of the Workshop. We’ve received a bumper crop of proposals for Technical Sessions to be presented this year; the Program Committee is at work building those proposals into a powerful agenda. This year’s focus will be on a dozen or so topic areas ranging from Artificial Intelligence, to Cloud infrastructure, to advanced network APIs and libraries, to remote Persistent Memory and many more. But the common theme among them all is to explore the role of fabrics in each one. Stay tuned for an announcement of the detailed agenda.
If advanced networks are anywhere in your job description, whether you are a developer or consumer of fabric technology, this Workshop is tailor made for you.
See you in Boulder. Detailed agenda coming soon.
Technical Program Committee Co-Chairs
Parks Fields – Los Alamos National Lab
Paul Grun – Cray, Inc.
*****
Registration:
Take advantage of Early Bird registration to the OFA Workshop 2018 before the March 19 deadline. For more information on event registration and lodging, visit the OFA Workshop 2018 Registration webpage.
Dates: April 9-13, 2018
Location: Embassy Suites by Hilton Boulder, CO
Registration Site: http://bit.ly/OFA2018REG
Registration Fee: $695 (Early Bird to March 19, 2018), $815 (Regular)
Lodging: Embassy Suites room discounts available until 6:00 p.m. MDT on Monday, March 19, 2018, or until room block is filled.
