USNIC

Libfabric: Cisco’s journey, playing well with MPI

1 min read

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 […]

usNIC inside Linux containers

11 min read

Linux containers, as a lighter virtualization alternative to virtual machines, are gaining momentum. The High Performance Computing (HPC) community is eyeing Linux containers with interest, hoping that they can provide the isolation and configurability of Virtual Machines, but without the performance penalties. In this article, I will show a simple example of libvirt-based container configuration […]

libfabric support of usNIC in Open MPI

3 min read

I’ve previously written about libfabric.  Here’s some highlights: libfabric is a set of next-generation, community-driven, ultra-low latency networking APIs The APIs are not tied to any particular networking hardware model Cisco is actively helping define, design, and develop the libfabric APIs as part of the community My fellow team member Reese Faucette recently contributed a […]

usNIC support for the Intel MPI Library

1 min read

Cisco is pleased to announce the intention to support the Intel MPI Library™ with usNIC on the UCS server and Nexus switches product lines over the ultra low latency Ethernet and routable IP transports, at both 10GE and 40GE speeds. usNIC will be enabled by a simple library plugin to the uDAPL framework included in […]

usNIC provider contributed to libfabric

1 min read

Today’s guest post is by Reese Faucette, one of my fellow usNIC team members here at Cisco. I’m pleased to announce that this past Friday, Cisco contributed a usNIC-based provider to libfabric, the new API in the works from OpenFabrics Interfaces Working Group. (Editor’s note: I’ve blogged about libfabric before) Yes, the road is littered with […]

HPC over UDP

2 min read

A few months ago, I posted an entry entitled “HPC in L3“.  My only point for that entry was to remove the “HPC in L3? That’s a terrible idea!” knee-jerk reaction that us old-timer HPC types have. I mention this because we released a free software update a few days ago for the Cisco usNIC […]

MPI over 40Gb Ethernet

1 min read

Half-round-trip ping-pong latency may be the first metric that everyone looks at with MPI in HPC, but bandwidth is one of the next metrics examined. 40Gbps Ethernet has been available for switch-to-switch links for quite a while, and 40Gbps NICs are starting to make their way down to the host. How does MPI perform with […]

At SC’13 next week? Come say hi!

1 min read

Are you going to be in Denver at SC’13 next week? Good! You need to stop by the Cisco booth (#2535) and say hi to your friendly neighborhood Open MPI developers: Dave Goodell, Reese Faucette, and Jeff Squyres.

Lawrence Berkeley Labs talk: Cisco Userspace NIC (usNIC)

1 min read

Here’s the slides from my second talk, which is a deep technical dive into both how the usNIC technology works, and how we use that technology in the BTL plugin that we wrote for Open MPI (which is upstream starting with Open MPI v1.7.3).