Posts by XNOR 4 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Nov 2014
Some people want a storage medium that is entirely passive and does not include electronics. The number of available options for meet this requirement is surprisingly small - and most of them come in the form of a 12cm shiny disc.
This physical format has been commercially available since 1982. Yes, 33 years. An eternity in technology. Whenever the format has been upgraded the physical form remained the same and any new readers are compatible with all previous formats sharing this shape. I see little reason for any future passive storage media to break this long continuity and change to a different form factor.
While these readers are no longer as ubiquitous as they used to be because networking has made them less important, I don't foresee any real problem obtaining them for a long time to come.
In a decade and a half Infiniband has not made much headway out of the HPC camp and into the data center where Ethernet is king. RoCE is one attempt to bring the gospel of RDMA to these lands but Intel is backing another (iWARP).
OPA is currently targeted at HPC clients as a "better Infiniband". It may or may not be a part of some grand plan for a converged network.
A couple of days before the announcement an Intel developer posted some patches to the linux-rdma mailing list in support of the Intel Omni Path Architecture (apparently referred to as OPA within Intel). The patches update some of the handling of MAD (MAnagement Datagrams) used for fabric management and adds, for example, a new type of bigger "jumbo" management datagrams.
If OPA uses the same basic message types (and acronyms) as IB, it is quite clear that OPA is based on the Infiniband protocol. Different physical interconnect. Some changes and extensions to higher level components like subnet management. But basically still IB underneath.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
