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Fabric Object
Fabric Object Overview
In libfabric, a fabric represents a logical network domain, a group of hardware and software resources that can communicate with each other through a shared network. All network ports that can exchange traffic belong to the same fabric domain. In practice, a fabric corresponds to one interconnected network, such as an Ethernet or Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET) fabric.
A good way to think about a fabric is to compare it to a Virtual Data Center (VDC) in a cloud environment. Just as a VDC groups together compute, storage, and networking resources into an isolated logical unit, a libfabric fabric groups together network interfaces, addresses, and transport resources that belong to the same communication context. Multiple fabrics can exist on the same system, just like multiple VDCs can operate independently within one cloud infrastructure.
The fabric object acts as the top-level context for all communication. Before an application can create domains, endpoints, or memory regions, it must first open a fabric using the fi_fabric() call. This creates the foundation for all other libfabric objects.
Each fabric is associated with a specific provider, for example, libfabric-uet, which defines how the fabric interacts with the underlying hardware and Continue reading