Libfabric: Cisco’s journey, playing well with MPI

In the previous blog entry, I shared the slides of one of the mini-talks that I gave at EuroMPI 2015 in Bordeaux, France (and don’t forget to start planning for EuroMPI 2016 in Edinburgh, Scottland).

The second mini-talk I gave was twofold in itself: I discussed Cisco’s journey from the Verbs API to the Libfabric API, and discussed how well Libfabric plays inside the Open MPI implementation.

Libfabric is still new, and many people are still quite curious about it — which is why I try to spend a little time on it here in my blog.

In the slides below, I describe the technical reasons why Libfabric is a much better fit (vs. the Verbs API) for many kinds of networks, including Cisco’s Ethernet userspace NIC solution.  I also describe the flexibility of Libfabric: it is used in two entirely different usage models within a single MPI implementation.

Want to learn more about Libfabric? Head over to libfabric.org. See various slides about the architecture and rationale of Libfabric, and also read the man pages that describe the API.