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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Operating Systems & Middleware:
The Open Group Announces Release Of IT-API
The Open Group announced the release of the Interconnect Transport Application
Programming Interface (IT-API) developed by the Interconnect Software
Consortium, a forum of The Open Group. The IT-API provides an open,
industry-standard application programming interface for RDMA (Remote Direct
Memory Access) applications that is both interconnect-independent and enables
"pedal-to-the-metal" performance. The IT-API enables distributed applications
to take advantage of the performance and horizontal scale-out benefits
delivered by RDMA-based interconnects.
IT-API version 1.0 currently supports both InfiniBand and the Virtual
Interface Architecture (VIA) standards, which are ready for deployment today.
It also provides support for the RDMA over TCP/IP standard specified by the
RDMA Consortium (iWARP). The IT-API will be extended to complete support for
the iWARP and IETF RDMA over IP (RDDP) specifications through a specification
update currently under development.
"This new industry standard API is not only an excellent example of industry
working together in the spirit of true open standards," said Allen Brown,
president and CEO of The Open Group. "But it will also demonstrate the
benefits of open standards by opening new opportunities for the utilization of
RDMA applications, resulting in enhanced performance and reliability,
optimized scalability and reduced total cost of ownership."
"It is exciting to see the ICSC community deliver upon its objective for
defining an open, industry standard, high-performance transport API
specification. This is a key building block for server I/O," commented Audrey
Helffrich, IBM Distinguished Engineer, "and one that will help pave the way
for enabling and accelerating a whole host of application exploitation
opportunities."
"Hewlett-Packard is excited to see the completion of the IT-API standard and
the benefits of providing an open industry-standard API for multiple
RDMA-capable technologies such as InfiniBand," noted Vish Mulchand, director
of server marketing at Hewlett-Packard. "This industry standard API will
enable a number of applications in the technical computing and distributed
database server markets to exploit the benefits of RDMA on HP's platforms."
"Network Appliance has long been a supporter of open, industry standard APIs
for high performance RDMA transports," said David Ford, director of
engineering at Network Appliance. "The release of version 1.0 of the IT API by
The Open Group enables a common API for UNIX systems that supports current and
future RDMA transports. This API will bring the benefits of high performance
I/O to data center applications on mission critical UNIX servers."
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