Group To Develop Infiniband Linux Software

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A group of eleven companies and two U.S. national laboratories is forming a consortium to define a standard Linux implementation of the Infiniband interconnect.

The Open Infiniband Alliance expects its first-generation set of standard Infiniband software drivers will be available later this year will be used primarily in high-end technical computing applications. A follow-on in about 18 months is targeted at large commercial database clusters.

"This is one of the most significant things to happen with Infiniband since its inception," said Jim Pappas, director of initiatives market for Intel Corp.'s server group, and a member of OpenIB. "We are going to choose not to differentiate products with proprietary software stacks but have a common open software approach," he added.

The group includes major computer and storage makers Dell, Engenio Inc. (formerly LSI Logic's RAID systems group), IBM, Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems as well as Infiniband chip and systems makers Infinicon, Mellanox, Topspin and Voltaire. Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Labs, big users of Infiniband clusters, are also participating.

OpenIB will complement the work of the Infiniband Trade Association that oversees the development of the core Infiniband spec but is forbidden by its charter from developing Infiniband software or application programming interfaces. OpenIB will announce its schedule for delivering the software before October, Pappas said.Engenio plans to demonstrate at the Supercomputing 2004 conference in Pittsburgh in November the first generation of Infiniband Linux software in its arrays used in so-called high-performance computing clusters. It will take about 18 months before a more robust Linux implementation suitable for commercial database clusters is ready, said Stan Skelton, Engenio's director of strategic planning.

Skelton said all of Engenio's RAID and storage array products currently use Fibre Channel interconnects. However, he expects a growing portion of the company's high-end arrays will move to Infiniband for big technical and commercial applications.

The chief executives of Infiniband chip and systems companies agreed at this spring's Intel Developer Forum to cooperate on Linux software implementations, said Pappas.

"When we looked at the Infiniband software stacks, there was a lot of divergence of implementations, and that was not the best thing for driving the adoption of the technology," he said.

The Infiniband implementation under Linux will be available under a standard open source license. "We expect several hardware and software platform companies will use this software once it becomes available," Pappas said.0