Intel® MPI Library Developer Guide for Windows* OS

ID 768730
Date 3/22/2024
Public

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Fabrics Control

The Intel® MPI Library switched from the Open Fabrics Alliance* (OFA) framework to the Open Fabrics Interfaces* (OFI) framework and currently supports libfabric*.

NOTE:
The supported fabric environment has changed since Intel® MPI Library 2019. The dapl andtcp fabrics are now deprecated.

OFI is a framework focused on exporting communication services to applications. OFI is specifically designed to meet the performance and scalability requirements of high-performance computing (HPC) applications running in a tightly coupled network environment. The key components of OFI are application interfaces, provider libraries, kernel services, daemons, and test applications.

Libfabric is a library that defines and exports the user-space API of OFI, and is typically the only software that applications deal with directly. The libfabric's API does not depend on the underlying networking protocols, as well as on the implementation of the particular networking devices, over which it may be implemented. OFI is based on the notion of application centric I/O, meaning that the libfabric library is designed to align fabric services with application needs, providing a tight semantic fit between applications and the underlying fabric hardware. This reduces overall software overhead and improves application efficiency when transmitting or receiving data over a fabric.

For more information, refer to the following topics: