Liqid,
the world's leading software company delivering data center
composability, announced the company is collaborating with
Samsung, the world's largest provider of memory technologies, and
Tanzanite Silicon Solutions, the leader in memory pooling technology, to
demonstrate composable memory via the Compute Express Link (CXL) 2.0
protocol at Dell Technologies World 2022 (booth #242). Delivering
high-speed CPU-to-memory connections for the first time, CXL decouples
DRAM from the CPU, the final hardware element to be disaggregated. With
native support for CXL, Liqid Matrix composable disaggregated
infrastructure (CDI) software can now pool and compose memory in tandem
with GPU, NVMe, persistent memory, FPGA, and other accelerator devices.
By making DRAM a composable resource over CXL fabrics, Liqid, Samsung,
and Tanzanite showcase the efficiency and flexibility necessary to meet
the changing infrastructure demands being driven by rapid advancements
in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI+ML), edge computing,
and hybrid cloud environments.
"With
the breakthrough performance provided by CXL, the industry will be
better positioned to support and make sense of the massive wave of AI
innovation predicted over just the next few years, and we're excited to
collaborate with Samsung and Tanzanite to illustrate the power of this
new protocol," said Ben Bolles, Executive Director, Product Management,
Liqid. "As our demonstration illustrates, by decoupling DRAM from the
CPU, CXL enables us to achieve these milestone results in performance,
infrastructure flexibility, and more sustainable resource efficiency,
preparing organizations to rise to the architectural challenges that
industries face as AI evolves at the speed of data."
According
to Gartner, AI use in the enterprise has tripled in the past two years,
and by 2025 AI will be the top driver of infrastructure decision making
as the AI market matures, resulting in a 10x growth in compute
requirements over that same period.
The
adoption of CXL technology will significantly aid in addressing this
exploding demand for expansive compute performance, efficiency, and
sustainability not possible with traditional architectures. This allows
for previously static DRAM resources to be shared for exponentially
higher performance, reduced software stack complexity, and lower overall
system cost, permitting users to focus on accelerating time to results
for target workloads as opposed to maintaining physical hardware.
With
a wave of CXL-supported servers becoming commercially available,
composability incorporated into any server refresh will both enable
existing resources to continue to be utilized, while also deploying DRAM
as a shared, bare-metal resource that can be utilized in tandem with
accelerator technologies already available to Liqid Matrix CDI
software. With knowledge of the urgent need for compute performance and
efficiency, Liqid Matrix software leads the industry in recognizing CXL
as a fabric type.
Samsung
is the world leader in advanced memory technologies and has been
collaborating with data center, server, and chipset manufacturers to
develop CXL interface technology since the CXL Consortium was formed in
2019. Samsung's newly unveiled DDR5-based CXL module is the industry's
first memory expansion module supporting the interface. CXL memory
expansion technology scales memory capacity and bandwidth well beyond
what is available commercially, enabling organizations to meet the
demands of much larger, more complex workloads associated with AI and
other evolving data center applications.
"With
new DDR5 based CXL memory modules, Samsung is helping to lay the
foundation for a high-bandwidth, low-latency memory ecosystem designed
to support and advance the modern computing era in which AI+ML is
integrated into more day-to-day data center operations," said Cheolmin
Park, Vice President of Memory Global Sales & Marketing at Samsung
Electronics. "We are growing the CXL ecosystem with Liqid and others to
unlock the unprecedented infrastructure performance required to achieve
breakthroughs in high-performance computing for our customers and the
industry as a whole."
Tanzanite's architecture and the purpose-built design of its "Smart Logic Interface Connector" (SLICTZ)
enable independent scaling and sharing of memory and compute in a
low-latency pool within and across server racks. The Tanzanite solution
provides a highly scalable architecture for exa-scale level memory
capacity and compute acceleration.
For
Dell Technologies World, the Liqid team collaborated with Samsung and
Tanzanite Silicon Solutions engineers to demonstrate the potential for
composable DRAM in real-world scenarios. The lab configuration consists
of two Next-Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based Archer City systems
(codenamed Sapphire Rapids), along with Tanzanite's SLIC SoC
implemented in an Intel Agilex FPGA, demonstrating clustered/tiered
memory allocated across two hosts and orchestrated using Liqid Matrix
CDI software.
"We're
excited to work with Liqid and Samsung to demonstrate our shared vision
of the potential for the CXL protocol with Tanzanite's industry-leading
memory pooling solution, applicable to a broad range of emerging
applications such as AI+ML, blockchain technology, and the metaverse,"
said Shalesh Thusoo, CEO, CTO, and Founder, Tanzanite Silicon Solutions.
"As the demonstration at Dell Technologies World shows, composability
for DRAM via CXL has radical implications for how we architect our
hardware ecosystems for better efficiency, performance, and flexibility
in a world operating at data center scale."