OPENFABRICS ALLIANCE
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is an open source-based organization that develops, tests, licenses, supports and distributes OpenFabrics Software (OFS). The Alliance’s mission is to develop and promote software that enables maximum application efficiency by delivering wire-speed messaging, ultra-low latencies and maximum bandwidth directly to applications with minimal CPU overhead. Founded in June 2004 as the OpenIB Alliance, the Alliance was originally focused on developing a vendor-indepe... ndent, Linux-based InfiniBand software stack. In 2005, the Alliance committed itself to supporting Windows, a move that would make the Alliance’s software stack truly cross-platform. In 2006, the organization again expanded its charter to include support for iWARP and in 2010 it added support for RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), both for delivering high-performance RDMA and kernel bypass solutions over Ethernet. In 2014 the Alliance expanded again with the creation of the OpenFabrics Interfaces working group to investigate and incorporate support for other high performance networks. Today, the vision of the OpenFabrics Alliance is to deliver a unified, cross-platform, transport-independent software stack for RDMA and kernel bypass. Transport independence means that users can utilize the same OpenFabrics RDMA and kernel bypass API to run their applications agnostically over InfiniBand, iWARP, RoCE, or other fabrics. To that end, the OFA provides tools and development resources to code, refine and publish standards-based, open-source software with the scalability and performance necessary to support mission-critical applications. Alliance members and other contributors participate within Working Groups to ensure OFS functionality, ease of use and deployment, and interoperability with networking hardware and major operating systems. Membership in the Alliance in not required to participate in most of the Working Groups.