OpenFabrics Alliance Welcomes Microsoft as Newest Member

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA), an industry consortium that develops, tests, licenses and distributes cross-platform, open-source software for high-performance computing, today announced that Microsoft has joined the OFA. Microsoft is joining at the promoter level, which is OFA’s highest membership level and gives Microsoft a seat on the OFA board, full voting rights, membership in all working groups, and the opportunity to influence the long-term evolution of the most widely adopted middleware for high-performance computing, networking and storage.

“I am excited to announce Microsoft as our newest member,” said Jim Ryan, chairman of the OpenFabrics Alliance. “OFA’s momentum is at an all-time high and OpenFabrics Software is receiving tremendous acceptance in the HPC community as evidenced by the fact that six out of every ten new HPC clusters are installed running OpenFabrics. Microsoft customers who combine OpenFabrics Software with Windows HPC Server in InfiniBand or Ethernet environments can benefit from unsurpassed performance and massive scalability for their Windows applications.”

“This move represents a further step in our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high-performance applications,” said Kyril Faenov, Microsoft’s General Manager of High Performance Computing. “We have been contributing to the OpenFabrics open-source Windows distribution (WinOF) for some time and are now joining the OFA to collaborate even more closely to accelerate WinOF’s adoption and the use of RDMA networking in general. Our customers require increased computing efficiency and shorter time-to-insight, and the use of WinOF drivers with Windows HPC Server’s NetworkDirect RDMA interface is instrumental in meeting those needs.”

The addition of Microsoft has been welcomed by the entire OFA membership. Ian Miller, senior vice president of the productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray (Nasdaq GM: CRAY), said, “We see Windows HPC Server becoming an increasingly important force in high productivity computing. Microsoft’s commitment to enhancing it with the highest-speed interconnects and open-source middleware is an example of Microsoft’s dedication to optimizing application performance and enhancing the competitiveness of its customers. At Cray, we are finding HPC computing paradigms to be increasingly popular across a broad range of market sectors, including aerospace, automotive, digital media, energy, financial services, life sciences, and government and academia.”

At SC09, Microsoft will demonstrate the stability and performance of WinOF drivers for quad data rate (40Gb/s) InfiniBand in its booth (#1135).

About the OpenFabrics Alliance

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is an industry consortium that develops, tests, licenses and distributes cross-platform, open-source software for high-performance, low-latency computing. OpenFabrics Software is used in business, research and scientific environments that require highly efficient networks, storage connectivity and parallel computing. OpenFabrics Software is included in major Linux distributions and supports Microsoft Windows. In addition to developing software, OFA conducts interoperability testing to ensure its software meets multi-vendor enterprise requirements for usability and reliability. For more information about OFA, visit www.OpenFabrics.org.