In addition to previously announced keynote presentations from thought leaders at AMD, Oracle, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, the Sonoma Workshop will feature talks by personnel from IDC, NASA, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), and a major United States automaker.

The global computing infrastructure manager for a leading automobile manufacturer will speak about how OpenFabrics software running in InfiniBand-connected clusters is accelerating many aspects of the worldwide design and engineering processes for next-generation energy-efficient automobiles.

Bob Ciotti of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing Division will describe NASA's new Pleiades system, which is nr. 3 on the list of TOP500 HPC implementations. Pleiades is dedicated to providing scientists and engineers with the modelling and simulation tools needed to carry out critical NASA missions. Pleiades features 47,104 quad-core processors, and this talk will describe how OpenFabrics software with the dual rail DDR IB fabric is providing 40 GB per second I/O speeds to support such a powerful and sophisticated environment.

Tommy Minyard will describe TACC's experience with Linux, OpenFabrics and Lustre on Ranger, the largest computing system in the world for open science research. Ranger is the sixth-highest performing supercomputer and has been in production for over a year.

Other speakers at the Sonoma Workshop will include Richard Walsh and Jie Wu from the prominent research firm IDC. They will report on how deployed technologies for high-performance, low-latency networks have evolved in recent years, as well as market data for interconnect networks and software.

To register for the workshop, you can visit www.OpenFabrics.org