Sonoma Workshop 2008 OpenFabrics at 40 and 100 Gigabits? Bill Boas, Vice-Chair

2 “Ancient Chinese Proverbs”  “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past”  “Don’t bet against Ethernet”  “The value of a network scales as the square of the number of connections in that network”  “1 GHz of processor = 1 Gbps of data transfer to/from memory”  Network BandwidthNo of 3GHz Cores  10G4  40G16  100G40  “The best form of defense, is offense”

3 40 and 100 Gigabits?  Why should the OpenFabrics think about its members’ mutual interest at these speeds?  IEEE P802.3ba Task Force now approved to standardize the next generation of “Ethernet” (s), but it will take years!  This creates the need and opportunity for “Ethernet” to change – it has every time in 20 years that IEEE process has scaled up  Total Ethernet Market size in 2006 according to Dell’Oro Group was 182,817,000 port shipments  IDC states 177,334 switch ports and HCAs  Even in Top 500 in Nov 2007 interconnects  IB - 24%, Eth.-70%

4 Proposed Commonality Initiatives  To the IEEE 802.3ba  Accept “us” participating in the work to create commonality  at the physical layer so a common set of physical components is needed for each market – server/application and aggregation  At the link layer options that allow the Openfabrics software stack to efficiently utilize the physical components and the higher layer network and transport layers and full interchangeability of traffic, management, etc.  To the IBTA  Develop standards for payloads – not just signalling at 40 and 100G

5 Ethernet Standards and Variants  LAN over copper, multi and single mode, fiber and wireless  Industry Interest Groups –  Computer and Blade back and mid planes  Datacenter  Metro  Carrier  But IEEE Task Force will only consider Physical and Link Layer standards  All Interest Groups that define Network Layer,Transport and above exist and set standards themselves or others like IETF, OIF, T10, T11, etc examples are iSCSI, or FCoE, etc.

6 What is IEEE 802.3ba Task Group considering  Source: “The Next Generation of Ethernet” by John D’Ambrosia, Chair, IEEE Communications – Feb 2008 ps 8-15  40G for computing, servers and storage at distances of 1m backplane, 10m copper, 100m multi-mode fiber  100G for network aggregation at 100m, 10km, 40km  High probability of identical Physical Layer implementations  Possibility of multiple architectures and implementations  Many options that are consistent with IB architecture – “quad channel bonding” “differential pairs at 10 gigabits, …. possibly even 25 gigabits”, “8B/10B encoding”  Is there an opportunity to gain acceptance for an “Ethernet” option that can deliver the beneficial features of IB?

7 Market and Customer Impacts  Higher volume of components at physical layer  Will help make optical more cost competitive  Lower Component costs overall  Should simplify range of different software implementations  Remove the InfiniBand versus Ethernet versus Fibre Channel wars that analysts love and customers probably don’t like at all  Logical next step for OpenFabrics folling the single stack for IB and Ethernet

8 Proposed Commonality Initiatives  To the IEEE 802.3ba  Accept “us” participating in the work to create commonality  at the physical layer so a common set of physical components is needed for each market – server/application and aggregation  At the link layer options that allow the Openfabrics software stack to efficiently utilize the physical components and the higher layer network and transport layers and full interchangeability of traffic, management, etc.  To the IBTA  Develop standards for payloads – not just signalling at 40 and 100G