Geometric transitions, del Pezzo surfaces and open string instantons

We continue the study of a class of geometric transitions proposed by Aganagic and Vafa which exhibit open string instanton corrections to Chern-Simons theory. In this paper we consider an extremal transition for a local del Pezzo model which predicts a highly nontrivial relation between topological open and closed string amplitudes. We show that the open string amplitudes can be computed exactly using a combination of enumerative techniques and Chern-Simons theory proposed by Witten some time ago. This yields a striking conjecture relating all genus topological amplitudes of the local del Pezzo model to a system of coupled Chern- Simons theories.