[ofw] SC'09 BOF - Meeting notes

[Woodruff, Robert J]

Hmmm - the original mail I sent did not seem to show up
on the list. Maybe the spam filters caught it because of the
attachment. Re-sending without the attachment. If anyone wants
a copy of the final slides, let me know and I can send them
directly. Below is the notes from the BOF.

woody


-----Original Message-----
From: Woodruff, Robert J 
Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2009 10:16 AM
To: Woodruff, Robert J; Tziporet Koren; Gilad Shainer; Yiftah Shahar; Betsy Zeller; Smith, Stan; HalRosenstock; Jeff Squyres; DKPanda; pgrun at systemfabricsworks.com
Cc: hrap at us.ibm.com; bboas at systemfabricworks.com; pgrun at systemfabricsworks.com; rpearson at sxystemfabricsworks.com; OpenFabrics EWG; ofw at lists.openfabrics.org
Subject: SC'09 BOF - Meeting notes and Final Slides

Here are just a few notes from the OFA BOF at SC'09. 
Stan also took a few notes and can add any additional comments
if I missed anything in these notes. 

We had some discussion about the new RDMAoE support and
if we should try to get it into OFED-1.5 or wait till a later release.

Since this is such a major change and OFED-1.5 is already at RC2,
several people expressed concern that it might be better to not
hold up OFED-1.5 and release the RDMAoE support in a later
release after it has been accepted upstream and tested more. We asked for a show
of hands and more people though it was better to wait than to 
put the code in at this late date. This is just one data point
for the EWG to take into consideration when deciding how and when to incorporate the
new code.

We also discussed the possibility of dropping support for RHEL 4
for OFED-1.6. Most people seemed to agree that if RHEL EL6 is out
by then, that it would probably be OK to drop RHEL 4, as it would
likely then not be supported anymore by Redhat.  No one voiced a strong
desire to continue to support EL 4 for OFED-1.6.

In the WinOF section, it was announced that Microsoft has now joined
the Open Fabrics alliance as a voting member. Welcome aboard Microsoft!!!!

We discussed the topic of if we should continue to include the open source
MPIs in the OFED releases. As was the case in Sonoma, there were people
that expressed both arguments for keeping the MPIs in the release and those 
that thought we should not distribute the MPIs. I don't think there is a 
consensus either way on this one. 

On the topic of scalability and possible future enhancements for scalability,
one person asked for verbs extensions to allow asynchronous QP create and
modify calls.  As for the rest of the proposed scalability enhancements, 
most people agreed that there are scalability issues with the RDMA CM
and the SA, so work definitely needs to be done in this area. There was not
too much discussion on the other suggestions that Hal had sent in, but
scalability should be a major topic area for the next 
developer's workshop in Sonoma. 

There was also some discussion on the new collective offload that some
of the IHVs have started to implement in hardware and that there is a need
for standard verbs extensions to allow common APIs that will allow access 
to these offloaded collectives.  Maybe this could also be a topic for the 
next Sonoma workshop. 

On the topic of building Ethernet clusters for HPC, we ran a bit short of
time and so we decided to defer this topic. Maybe we can have a session
on Sonoma on this one as well. 

Attached is the final version of the slides that were presented. 

woody