The international high performance computing (HPC) community is preparing for the upcoming Supercomputing Conference 2017 (SC17) – being held this year at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO, November 12-17 – and the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is excited to be taking part in this annual gathering. The SC17 technical program will once again explore a broad range of HPC networking topics through a collection of individual talks, panel discussions, research papers, tutorials, workshops, poster presentations and birds of a feather (BoF) sessions.
The OFA’s OpenFabrics Interfaces Working Group (OFIWG) will contribute its expertise to this year’s program with a BoF session dedicated to the consumers of libfabric API. Since its introduction, libfabric has gained quite a bit of traction among the users of network-based services. This upcoming BoF will be focused on those deploying libfabric in support of applications, building on top of previous sessions covering initial libfabric developments.
The overall objective of the OFIWG BoF is to bring together individuals, companies, and institutions with a vested interest in deploying libfabric to share results, foster collaboration and spark new ideas for further development of the API. Anyone who is curious about libfabric or networking operations from a consumer perspective, as well as those evaluating libfabric as a future path, will benefit from this discussion.
Session details can be found on the SC17 Online Program and are as follows:
Fabric APIs – libfabric User Perspective and C++ Standardization
Tuesday, November 14 from 5:15pm – 7pm
Colorado Convention Center, Room 503-504
Application performance and scalability is affected by the design and usability of network APIs. OpenFabrics libfabric promises high-performance access to fabric services, through an implementation agnostic interface.
Based on the architectural work that went into the creation of a fabric-agnostic API, OpenFabrics is a natural fit for discussing expanding the adoption of fabric APIs.
This BoF will begin with a series of lightning talks to share experiences developing to libfabric. It will conclude by proposing that OpenFabrics develop fabric extensions to the C++ networking technical specification, for submission to the ISO C++ standards committee.
Session Leaders:
- Jeffrey Squyres – Cisco Systems
- Sean Hefty – Intel Corporation
- Chris Taylor – US Department of Defense
Interested in learning more about the OFIWG and its work? Visit the Working Groups Overview page for additional information. We look forward to seeing you in Denver!
