The OpenFabrics Alliance Unveils Training Programs on OpenFabrics Software and Tools

The OpenFabrics Alliance an open source community that delivers open-source I/O solutions announced a new training initiative that is suitable for application developers, system architects and IT managers in the enterprise data center, financial services and High Performance Computing or HPC fields.

The OFA training initiative is expected to provide an introduction and hands-on experience with, OpenFabrics Software and related software tools. The training initiative will encompass many courses for next year.

According to official sources two courses announced now include - “Introduction to OpenFabrics Software Mini-Course” that will be available upon request at the clients location or the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab.

The second course is titled - “Programming with OpenFabrics Software” which will be held in January, 2011on the 19 and 20, from 8:00am to 5:00pm at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab.

In a release Jim Ryan, manager at Intel (News - Alert) Corporation and chair of the OpenFabrics Alliance said, “OpenFabrics Software, traditionally used in HPC, is approachable, usable and beneficial to the enterprise data center. This new OFA training initiative highlights the value that OpenFabrics Software brings to end-user organizations, including high CPU efficiency, reduced energy consumption and reduced rack-space requirements.”

 “Introduction to OpenFabrics Software Mini-Course” is designed especially for developers, system integrators and managers. It offers an overview of the benefits of OpenFabrics technologies and will introduce them to OpenFabrics Software and Remote Direct Memory Access or RDMA concepts, explained official sources.

“Programming with OpenFabrics Software” course has been designed to provide experienced application developers who are new to OpenFabrics Software to write application programs using RDMA. The lessons will provide practical, hands-on knowledge of the OFA stack and focus on the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution or OFED API, RDMA concepts and common design patterns.

By leveraging the facilities present in the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Lab, attendees can actually run tests on a full-fledged OFA cluster in a working HPC environment.

Robert D. Russell, associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of New Hampshire will lead the initial training courses. Dr. Russell has worked with the InterOperability Laboratory’s iSCSI or Internet Small Computer Systems Interconnect consortium; iWARP which is the family of protocols for remote direct memory access over TCP/IP consortium, and the OpenFabrics Interoperability Logo Program.