Open Compute Project Foundation and UALink establish an AI and HPC cluster framework

UALink Consortium is developing an open industry standard for high-performance accelerated compute scale-up interconnects tailored for AI and HPC workloads, while the OCP Community is actively designing large-scale data center infrastructure with a focus on Open Systems for AI.

Through their partnership, OCP and UALink aim to integrate UALink's scale-up AI interconnect technology into OCP Community-delivered AI clusters, providing the high-bandwidth, low-latency, low-power connectivity required for high-performance AI training and inference.

As part of the collaboration, the two organizations will focus on aligning OCP's community-led infrastructure development with UALink's interconnect elements, ensuring seamless integration and shared objectives. The alliance will leverage the expertise of both organizations to advance scale-up AI interconnect performance.

Following the release of the UALink 1.0 Specification earlier this month, organizations and their communities are preparing to collaborate across OCP's Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative and OCP's Future Technologies Initiative Short-Reach Optical Interconnect workstream.

"The surge in generative AI and HPC applications is placing immense pressure on data center interconnects to deliver the bandwidth and responsiveness needed for training and inference,” said Sameh Boujelbene, VP at Dell'Oro Group. The alliance between OCP and UALink creates a powerful collaborative framework to develop and integrate advanced interconnect solutions, enhancing the performance of large-scale AI clusters.”

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