Paradigm Change: Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O

This white paper from Ayar Labs, “Paradigm Change: Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O,” discusses an important innovation: reinventing HPC architectures with in-package optical I/O. The introduction of in-package optical I/O technology helps HPC centers accelerate the slope of compute progress needed to tackle ever-growing scientific problem sizes and HPC/AI convergence.

Paradigm Change: Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O

In this white paper, our friends over at Ayar Labs discuss an important paradigm change: reinventing HPC architectures with in-package optical I/O. The introduction of in-package optical I/O technology helps HPC centers accelerate the slope of compute progress needed to tackle ever-growing scientific problem sizes and HPC/AI convergence. Ayar Labs expects to not only see its technology extend the traditional type of architecture to put the HPC industry back on track, but also result in an inflection point that fundamentally changes the  slope of the compute performance efficiency curve. The key will be enabling converged HPC/AI centers to  build systems with disaggregated CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and custom ASICs interconnected on equal footing.

Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O

In this sponsored post, our friends over at Ayar Labs indicate that although the industry has long recognized the potential of optical I/O as a solution for many HPC challenges, it is only in recent years that economic in-package optical solutions have become available. At last, optical I/O has emerged as the best solution to drive the next phase of Moore’s Law-like advances in post-exascale systems performance. In part this is because there have not been game-changing breakthroughs in the materials used in traditional interconnects.

Never Enough Bandwidth: Optical I/O Consortium Formed to Set Interconnect Standards

More than 20 companies have joined an industry consortium to establish specifications for multi-wavelength integrated optics – the emerging interconnect technology whose advocates say is critical to next-generation HPC and AI. Announced today, the CW-WDM MSA (Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing Multi-Source Agreement) Group, wants to build an ecosystem to work on common standards and interoperability for dense laser light sources, which in turn will enable broad adoption of optical I/O.

Video: Ayar Labs pushes Moore’s Law through Optical I/O technology

In this video, Mark Wade from Ayar Labs explains how the company’s optical I/O solution will address the critical computing challenges of efficiency, density, and distance for next-gen system architectures. “Our patented approach uses industry standard cost-effective silicon processing techniques to develop high speed, high density, low power optical based interconnect “chiplets” and multi-wavelength lasers to replace traditional electrical based I/O.”