The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) develops, tests, licenses, distributes and supports an open-source software stack known as the OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED™) for Linux and Windows. OFED is an enabler of high-performance, low-latency computing in enterprise datacenters and HPC sites.

OFA is a 501(c)(6) association.

OFED is comprised of hardware drivers from multiple vendors and kernel-level middleware that implements RDMA. Above this middleware there is a full range of services for breakthrough applications that require high efficiency computing, wire-speed messaging, microsecond latencies and fast I/O for storage and file systems. OFED is in production today at more than 60 percent of the Top500 HPC sites (www.top500.org).

OFED is available from, and supported by, the OFA itself as well as several OFA members, including HP, IBM, Mellanox, Oracle, QLogic, Sun and Voltaire. OFED is also available in Centos, Debian, Fedora, RHEL and SLES.

OFED delivers valuable benefits to end-user organizations, including high CPU efficiency, reduced energy consumption, and reduced rack-space requirements. It offers these benefits on commodity servers for academic, engineering, enterprise, research and cloud applications. OFED also provides investment protection as parallel computing and storage evolve towards exascale computing, and as networking speeds move toward 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 40 Gigabit InfiniBand in the enterprise datacenter.

An overview of OpenFabrics is here, and slides that describe how the OFA operates are here.

Get Your Products OFA Certified!

OFED interoperability testing is conducted twice a year at the University of New Hampshire’s InterOperability Laboratory. Software, server, storage and network vendors, OEMs and Systems Integrators can test the products of their choice for OFED interoperability. Products that pass the testing earn certification by OFA, and the product vendors have the right to promote these products with the OpenFabrics Interoperability logo, which assures customers the products can be deployed in single or multi-vendor environments with confidence. Click here for a detailed description of the OFA Interoperability Logo program.