Prof. Dhabaleswar K. Panda
panda@cis.ohio-state.edu
The Ohio State University
This tutorial is intended to provide an in-depth overview of the
emerging InfiniBand Architecture (IBA) standard. This new
architecture eliminates the PCI bus-based architecture and supports
switched connections. It incorporates high performance I/O in
addition to interprocessor communication, provides QoS and protection
in the network, provides multiple transport services, and allows
flexibility of IBA subnets to be connected to Wide Area Networks
(WANs) through routers. The IBA standard incorporates many of the
Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) functions at its verbs layer.
The tutorial will demonstrate how high performance communication and
I/O architectures for clusters can be designed with this standard by
taking into account interprocessor communication, network
communication, and communication to I/O devices. The basic components
of the IBA standard and multiple layers of this architecture will be
described in detail. The new functionalities associated with this
standard such as Quality of Service, Protection Domains, etc., for
designing large-scale enterprise servers will be discussed. The
interactions among these components and their interactions with the
host, OS, Network-Interface Card (NIC), router/switch, and I/O devices
to support low-latency and high bandwidth interprocessor communication
and I/O will be analyzed. Open research challenges in designing
scalable IBA implementations and providing support for higher-level
programming models (such as distributed memory, distributed shared
memory, and get/put ) on these systems will be outlined. The tutorial
will conclude with an overview of on-going InfiniBand and VIA related
research at universities, industry, and research labs.
Dhabaleswar K. Panda is a Professor of Computer Science at the Ohio
State University. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer engineering from
the University of Southern California. His research interests include
parallel computer architecture, user-level communication protocols,
interprocessor communication and synchronization, network-based
computing, and high-performance computing. He has published over 90
papers in major journals and international conferences related to
these research areas. Dr. Panda and his research group members have
been doing extensive research on VIA and InfiniBand. His research
group has collaborated with IBM T.J. Watson in designing a high
performance VIA implementation for the IBM Netfinity cluster system.
His research group is currently collaborating with Intel and IBM on
VIA and InfiniBand implementations.
Dr. Panda has served on Program Committees and Organizing Committees
of several parallel processing conferences. He was Program Co-Chair
of the 1999 International Conference on Parallel Processing, founding
Co-Chair of the 1997 and 1998 Workshops on Communication and
Architectural Support for Network-Based Parallel Computing (CANPC),
Co-Guest-Editor for two special issue volumes of Journal of Parallel
and Distributed Computing on ``Workstation Clusters and Network-based
Computing'', founding Co-Chair of International Workshop on
Communication Architecture for Clusters (CAC '01). He also served as
an IEEE Distinguished Visitor Speaker and an IEEE Chapters Tutorials
Program Speaker during 1997-2000. Currently, he is serving as an
Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed
Computing, General Co-Chair of the 2001 International Conference on
Parallel Processing, and Program Co-Chair of the 2002 Workshop on
Communication Architecture for Clusters (CAC '02). Dr. Panda is a
recipient of the NSF Faculty Early CAREER Development Award, the
Lumley Research Award at Ohio State University (1997 and 2001), and an
Ameritech Faculty Fellow Award. Dr. Panda is listed as a distinguished
scientist in "Who'sWho in America" and in "American Men &
Women of
Science".
More details on this tutorial can be obtained from the following URL:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~panda/cluster2001_tut.html