Virtual OFA Workshop 2021 Kicks Off with Keynote from Intel’s Dr. Debendra Das Sharma; Workshop Agenda and Abstracts Now Available

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Virtual Workshop is just around the corner – March 15-19, 2021 – and the Technical Program Committee (TPC) is excited to announce that Dr. Debendra Das Sharma of member company Intel Corporation will open the event with a keynote, “Evolution of Interconnects and Fabrics To Support Future Compute Infrastructure.”

Dr. Das Sharma is an Intel Fellow in the Data Platforms Group and director of the I/O Technology and Standards Group at Intel Corporation. He is a leading expert on I/O subsystem and interface architecture. Dr. Das Sharma’s team delivers Intel-wide critical interconnect technologies in Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), Compute Express Link (CXL), Intel’s Coherency interconnect, and multichip package interconnect. He is a key driver of external standards for PCIe and CXL, and internal proprietary interfaces, as well as implementation. 

In his address, Dr. Das Sharma will explore how synergistic evolution across interconnects and fabrics can benefit the compute infrastructure of the future.

High-performance workloads demand heterogeneous processing, tiered memory architectures including persistent memory, and infrastructure accelerators such as smart NICs to meet the needs of emerging applications in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Analytics, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloudification of the Network and Edge, communication systems, and HPC.

The interconnect is a key pillar in this evolving computational landscape. Recent advances in I/O interconnects such as PCI Express® and Compute Express Link™ with its memory and coherency semantics has made it possible to pool computational and memory resources at the rack level using low latency, higher throughput, and memory coherent access mechanisms. The industry is already at a point where networking fabrics and tightly coupled load-store interconnects have overlapping coverage with some common attributes like standardized fabric manager for managing resources, low-latency message passing across nodes, and shared memory across multiple independent nodes. The traditional I/O interconnects are making changes to their load-store semantics to provide efficient access mechanisms for fabrics with advanced atomics, acceleration, smart NICs, persistent memory support, etc.

Additionally, the OFA TPC announces that it has published the list of session abstracts and agenda for the Virtual 2021 Workshop. The workshop program will include 24 technical sessions covering a variety of critical networking topics, which range from Networks and the Convergence of HPC / Big Data to Evolving Networking in the Commercial World. Also, two Birds of a Feather sessions will be held to discuss the OpenFabrics Management Framework and the Fabric Software Development Platform (FSDP) cluster.

To view the full list of abstracts and agenda, visit the Virtual OFA Workshop 2021 Agenda and Abstracts page.

Registration:

Registration is open for the 2021 OFA Virtual Workshop and is free of charge for all attendees. Register using the links below or visit the Registration page.

Please contact press@216.137.189.21 with any questions.