Curtiss-Wright Controls Defense Solutions debuts its first commercially available port of OFED (Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution) for RapidIO. CWCDS’s OFED stack includes support for Remote Direct Memory Access. The introduction of this new OFED stack for Serial RapidIO enables COTS embedded military system designers to, for the first time, build extremely high performance, scalable HPEC systems using open software and SRIO, the COTS market’s preferred switched serial fabric for architecting OpenVPX high performance systems in Intel Corei7-based platforms. This advance helps ease, speed and lower the cost of developing HPEC systems to address the most demanding C4ISR signal, image and radar processing applications.
The OFED stack for Serial RapidIO supports CWCDS’s CHAMP-AV8 (VPX6-462) Digital Signal Processing engine. OFED, developed and maintained by Open Fabrics Alliance, is open-source software for RDMA and kernel bypass applications. RDMA enables large numbers of Linux processing elements to share data while minimizing CPU overhead and maximizing fabric throughput. It is widely used today in commercial HPC systems for breakthrough applications that require high efficiency computing, low latencies and high bandwidth utilization. The OFED stack allows applications written for Ethernet and Infiniband platforms to run on Curtiss-Wright’s RapidIO-based HPEC platform.
Serial RapidIO is not supported by the open source OFED package. Curtiss-Wright's OFED implementation provides an OFED device driver for SRIO on Intel Corei7 Intel processors with IDT's Tsi721 PCIe2-to-SRIO2 RapidIO bridge. This driver can be easily integrated into the open source OFED environment. This layer emulates an Infiniband device on top of Serial RapidIO to provide the necessary mappings needed for the RDMA services. As a result, standard applications such as MPI that access RDMA services using verbs will work transparently and efficiently on SRIO hardware.
