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by burnt-resistor 582 days ago
Nice nice!

Btw, I'm wondering if OFED and/or DPDK are also still used, and if they're still used for fast packet pushing.

4 comments

By OFED I assume you are meaning RDMA and yes, it's used extensively. Not just in HPC but anywhere you are doing high performance collective communication. Frameworks like MPI, UPC/UPC++, NCCL, UCX etc are all underpinned by RDMA. Most of the AI distributed training frameworks are MPI based for example.

OFED is less of a thing now because most of the work has gone upstream, both into the kernel and into the rdma-core userland.

Also worth mentioning that MLNX_OFED (sometimes called MOFED) is now being transitioned into DOCA-Host. This is mostly because of that aforementioned upstreaming and the move towards more SmartNIC stuff (ala Bluefield) being the focus as core RDMA support is mostly provided by upstream.

I think there must be still some corp frameworks that do use it extensively, but it's just not heard all that much about.

Some examples, (Broadcom) Vmware NSX-T gateways, Alivaba used to use it, and a lot of extreme HFT use it too, mostly to reduce latency and manipulate tcp.

My day job is working on a product that uses DPDK for a super high performance file system.
Can't use RDMA without MOFED properly on Nvidia cards.