Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and startup Ayar Labs have announced that they will collaborate to bring silicon photonics based optical I/O interconnect capabilities to HPE’s Slingshot Ethernet fabric. To support the work, HPE’s venture arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, has made a strategic investment in Ayar Labs, the amount of which was not disclosed.
Founded in 2015, Ayar Labs is developing optical I/O technology based on its proprietary chiplets and SuperNova external lasers (see “Optical interconnect startup Ayar Labs closes $35 million Series B funding round” and “Ayar Labs partners with GLOBALFOUNDRIES for optical I/O demo, expanded sampling for co-packaged optics”). Its multi-year work with HPE will seek to apply its technology to improve the performance of HPE Slingshot to meet the expected needs of disaggregated high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. HPE cites the upcoming U.S. Department of Energy’s requirements for exascale supercomputers as an example, as well as “emerging heterogeneous compute systems; disaggregated, pooled designs; and unified memory architectures.” The two companies say their collaboration will not only include research and commercial development, but the creation of a joint ecosystem of technology providers as well as customer engagements.
“We continue to invest in and develop our HPC and AI technologies to further boost application performance for our customers and help them unlock greater value from their research, engineering, and business initiatives,” said Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and AI, at HPE. “By partnering with Ayar Labs, we will advance innovation for the HPC and AI market and leverage their expertise in optical I/O in future generations of HPE Slingshot to deliver unprecedented bandwidth and speed, at lower levels of power and latency, to meet requirements for growing demands in scale and performance.”
“HPE is the leader in advanced systems architectures for HPC, AI, and networking,” asserted Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs. “This collaboration will accelerate the introduction of a whole new class of system architectures that overcome the existing limitations of traditional interconnects, ushering in a new era for efficient, scalable high-performance computing.”
“Ayar Labs represents an exciting investment opportunity for Hewlett Packard Pathfinder as we closely support HPE’s HPC and AI initiatives,” added Paul Glaser, vice president and head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. “Ayar Labs’ optical I/O technology is highly differentiated and critical to the evolution of high-performance computing architectures.”
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