What are OpenFabrics, OFA, and OFED?
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) began in 2004 as an organization to standardize the InfiniBand transport protocol. In 2006 it expanded its mission to include the iWARP transport protocol as well. The OFED stack (OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution) is an open-source Linux module that presents to application programmers a uniform, transport-independent interface to RDMA hardware of either type. In other words, a program written using the OFED stack will run without changes on both InfiniBand and iWARP network fabrics. Since 2005 the OFA has also been responsible for an equivalent stack in the Windows environment called WinOF. For more details visit the UNH-IOL OFA page.
