OpenFabrics Alliance 2022 Virtual Workshop Recap

/ / Consortium News

Annual Workshop Featured Hands-On Tutorials and Trainings Alongside Wide Variety of Technical Sessions and Networking Demos

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) – sponsored by Cornelis Networks and Intel – concluded its virtual Workshop last month, providing a valuable forum for discussions on emerging fabrics technologies, future industry requirements, and new challenges facing the OpenFabrics community at large. This year’s Technical Program Committee (TPC) worked to craft a virtual program that supplied daily trainings and tutorials alongside a full track of technical sessions and demonstrations.

The OFA Virtual Workshop 2022 was held Tuesday, April 26 – Thursday, April 28 and continued to leverage a virtual format given the ongoing challenges stemming from the global pandemic. That said, the OFA looks forward to restarting its traditional, in-person event format in Columbus, OH, in Spring 2023. Additional details on the OFA Workshop in 2023 will be available in the coming months.

Interactive Trainings on Tap for Hands-on Networking Experience

The TPC organized three training sessions that ran in parallel to the standard sessions track this year, expanding on the ongoing OFA’s efforts to offer more collaborative learning opportunities at the annual gathering.

On Day 1, OFA experts were on hand to provide “Office Hours” on the newly launched Fabric Software Development Platform (FSDP), guiding attendees through the various steps necessary to make use of the FSDP test cluster. This included account creation, VPN setup, access to the builder machine, access to the beaker web interface, installation of the beaker command line tool, creation of simple automated tests, running of those tests, running of manual tests, and setting up CI pipelines for upstream repositories.

On Day 2 and 3, experts from The Ohio State University delivered two in-depth tutorials that covered innovative technologies and trends in High Performance Computing, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning, and included hands-on exercises to support first-hand experience running these types of workloads. The first training provided an overview of emerging High-End Computing technologies, their offered architectural features, their current market standing, and their suitability for designing systems. The second training gave an overview of recent trends in Machine Learning/Deep Learning and the role of cutting-edge hardware architectures and interconnects in moving the field forward.

Network Demonstrations and Technical Session Recordings on Demand

This year’s virtual program focused on the following overarching themes that cover advanced network technology, innovative networking approaches, and the open community:

  • Broader Ecosystem, Community, and Standards
  • Hardware Accelerations and In-Network Compute
  • High-Performance Software
  • Network Protocols and Technology
  • State-of-Practice
  • Other Topics in High-Performance Networking and Computing

In addition to the familiar Workshop technical session format, the program also featured a variety of intriguing demonstrations that showcased the new OpenFabrics Management Framework (OFMF), the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Swordfish scalable storage management standard, and several SNIA computational storage implementations.

As an open source organization, the OFA freely publishes the resulting materials of each annual Workshop for the benefit of the wider networking community. You can find the complete collection of this year’s Workshop presentations, demos, and video recordings on the 2022 Virtual OFA Workshop page.

An Eye Toward Returning to a F2F Workshop in 2023

As the OFA Community and networking industry continues to evolve, so too will the annual OFA Workshop to ensure that all opinions, voices, and inputs are heard, considered, and built upon. The OFA values collaboration among its members and the community as a whole. If you have any questions, or suggestions on how to make the next event even better, especially as we look to resume in-person activities, please email press@openfabrics.org.

Thank you to the OFA Virtual Workshop 2022 speakers, attendees, sponsors, and organizers for their excellent contributions to this year’s program.

We hope to see you in person next year in Columbus for OFA Workshop 2023!