[ewg] RE: Agenda for the OFED meeting today (Jan 5, 09)

[Hal Rosenstock]

Jeff,

On Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 3:26 PM, Jeff Squyres <jsquyres at cisco.com> wrote:
> I chatted with John and Todd from QL on the phone today -- we basically came
> to the same conclusion:
>
> - need to beef-up opensm to be able to scalably handle lots of incoming path
> record lookups

This is the most obvious SA scalability issue but there are some
others which may be important (related to SA caching rather than SA
distribution as an approach).

> - need to beef-up the CM clients on the host (maybe; this work might already
> be done?)
> - need to see the current status of the SA caching stuff / re-open that
> discussion to see if the work can be completed, etc.

IMO this will aggravate other SA scalability issues as well as there
being other limitations with this approach.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for improving the SA scalability; there's
no quick solution to this AFAIK.

It would be interesting to see an apples to apples comparison of
OpenSM and proprietary SMs in terms of running on the same hardware
and the transaction rate for various things.

I think this warrants an open discussion if people are serious about
working on this issue.

> It might also be worthwhile to start a whole new discussion about making a
> better CM (at least from the ULP perspective). One that offers simple
> mechanisms for those who don't need/care about the details, but also offers
> complex/detailed mechanisms (perhaps remarkably like today's mechanisms).

I've heard similar comments before but this too will take significant
where-with-all IMO.

-- Hal