System Fabric Works Supports RoCE

System Fabric Works (SFW), a software engineering and systems-integration company delivering open-source fabric and I/O solutions, announced support for RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) as an addition to the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) release 1.5.1 for Linux. RoCE is a new standard announced by the InfiniBand Trade Association.

SFW is supporting RoCE through a software implementation of RoCE called Soft RoCE. With this technology, SFW offers a third mechanism in its OFED release for supporting RDMA over Ethernet:

• Soft RoCE;
• a hardware-accelerated chipset directly on Ethernet adapters; and
• iWARP (RDMA over TCP/IP with a hardware offload adapter).

RDMA has long been a mainstay technology in HPC systems for both computing and storage networks, but has required specialized InfiniBand hardware. With this new release, RDMA is easily deployable in data centers and cloud computing environments without any new or specialized Ethernet switches and adapters. SFW’s OFED 1.5.1- rxe is downloadable.

"With Soft RoCE, SFW offers the opportunity for data center technologists to implement RDMA for their business solutions to improve computing efficiency, simplify infrastructure, and future proof their networks for scaling from 1 to 10 gigabits per second," said Dr. Robert Pearson CEO, CTO and Founder of System Fabric Works. "Soft RoCE achieves multi-million message per second rates, reduces latency over Ethernet vs. TCP/IP, and provides important end-user benefits as well as improving ROI in application software. By supplying Soft RoCE integrated with OFED, SFW is supplying and supporting the full range of OpenFabrics upper-level protocols, with RDMA, on standard Ethernet hardware."

OFED RDMA maximizes efficient utilization of processor, memory and network resources, and speeds the movement of data among servers and between servers and storage (e.g., SAN and NAS). In so doing, OFED RDMA delivers a truly unified network for use in parallel computing, storage I/O, and a host of enterprise applications, such as search, messaging, transaction processing, and virtualization. This yields significant cost savings in energy, floor space and cooling by reducing the hardware (servers, power supplies, racks, switches and cables) required for high performance, enterprise and cloud computing.

System Fabric Works has been involved since the inception of InfiniBand and the founding of the OpenFabrics Alliance. SFW is a Steering Committee member of The InfiniBand Trade Association, and provides the Executive Director for the OpenFabrics Alliance. Software originally developed by System Fabric Works for its customers has formed integral components of OFED on AIX, Linux, Solaris, Windows and VX Works, including network drivers for Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand and other media as well as storage interfaces for block storage (SRP and iSCSI) and file systems (NFS and Lustre). At the recent OpenFabrics Sonoma Workshops, SFW discussed the benefits of InfiniBand-connected storage, the architecture for torus and hypercube networks, and the implementation specifics of Soft RoCE in OFED 1.5.1.

OFED delivers up to ten times the performance of traditional network software at half the hardware cost. RDMA application interfaces on OFED support parallel processing (e.g., all major MPIs), sockets and messaging (AMQP, SDP and RDS), storage (SRP and iSER), files systems (NFS, Lustre) and databases (DB2, Oracle, etc.). Business solutions that leverage OFED range from scientific engineering/modeling, national security, media, communications and data warehousing to financial services, transaction processing and broadband video.