OFI

OFI, short for OpenFabrics Interfaces, is a portable, vendor-agnostic application programming interface used to access high-performance network fabrics in distributed computing environments. It is part of the libfabric project, which provides a common software layer for different network hardware and transport protocols.

Designed to support high-performance communication, OFI enables operations such as point-to-point messaging, collective operations, one-sided memory access, and atomic operations. The API abstracts application code from device-specific details by exposing resources such as fabrics, domains, endpoints, and address handles. Communication is implemented through providers that bind the API to concrete networks, including InfiniBand (IB verbs) and TCP/IP, as well as other fabric technologies.

Usage: OFI is used by high-performance computing libraries and runtimes, notably MPI implementations such as Open MPI and MPICH, to achieve portability and performance across diverse systems. Applications link to libfabric via the OFI API, selecting a provider at run time.

Development and status: OFI originated in the OpenFabrics Alliance and is maintained as part of the libfabric ecosystem. It emphasizes performance portability, incremental updates, and broad hardware support for clusters, supercomputers, and data-center networks.

See also: libfabric; OpenFabrics Alliance. The acronym OFI may refer to other organizations and initiatives in different contexts, but in computing it is most commonly associated with OpenFabrics Interfaces.