IBM, Dell, Intel and Oracle, among others, last week formed the OpenIB Alliance to develop an open-source version of the InfiniBand software stack.

InfiniBand is finally taking off as a server interconnect and is garnering the support of major companies such as Sun, Network Appliance and Veritas. It is being used predominantly to interconnect clusters of Linux servers.

Sandia National Laboratories, another member of the alliance, is building a 128-node cluster using Linux Networx servers and InfiniBand switches and host channel adapters from Voltaire.

The OpenIB Alliance will deliver a Linux-based software stack, which it will distribute under the GNU General Public License and Berkeley Software Design models. While the first software stack to be open-sourced will be on Linux, alliance members say they will work on Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X stacks in the future.

The stack to be developed will comply with the InfiniBand Trade Association interconnect standard, improve interoperability and reduce the time it takes to complete data center and high-performance computing deployments, the organization says.

Until now, hardware vendors such as Voltaire and TopSpin have provided their own proprietary software with their switches and host channel adapters.

The alliance will publish its delivery schedule, as well as a tutorial on using the stack, in the third quarter of this year.