June 24, 2005
I didn't know Etherfabric to date.
According to the Ether Fabric web page, especially a paragraph titled
"Binary Software Compatibility", they insist on that Ether Fabric
doesn't require any new protocol software. But, other paragraph titled
"How Ether Fabric Operates" says all socket and MPI operations invoke
functions in a special library of Ether Fabric.
In short, that looks like a hardware (and perhaps software assisted)
implementation of TCP/IP invoked from the user space. If this is
correct, I don't think EtherFabric can be a competitor of InfiniBand
nor iWARP. It's just like an yet another TOE. They need to care about
overall costs especially from a view point of the relationship between
socket API semantics and system bus workloads. (In this sense,
asynchronous operations of MPI could be improved efficiently.)
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