ANALYSIS: SILICON PHOTONICS
Silicon photonics underpins next-gen HPC and AI
Ayar Labs’ recent investment of $130m and a new partnership with Hewlett Packard marks progress towards commercialising its silicon photonics technology for computing. Robert Roe speaks to Hugo Saleh about the firm’s plans
A
partnership between Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and
Ayar Labs aims to develop silicon photonics solutions that will support the next generation of advanced computing systems.
HPE and Ayar Labs recently signed a multi-year strategic collaboration to accelerate the networking performance of computing systems and data centres by developing silicon photonics solutions based on optical I/O technology. Silicon photonics will be used to enhance the networking capabilities and support
14 Electro Optics May 2022
future requirements for high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing architectures. The technology also has the potential to reduce the amount of energy used in data centres and large computing systems. The two organisations also announced that HPE’s venture arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, has made a strategic investment in Ayar Labs to accelerate the development and adoption of joint future technologies. Hugo Saleh, Ayar Labs senior
vice president of commercial operations, stated: ‘Within
the press release, we talked about a few things. One is a future design of HPE Slingshot architecture, which has its genesis back at Cray. Today, it is their high-end, Ethernet- like, networking solution that is targeted for HPC. We’re also working with HPE on advanced architectures where we’re talking about the composability of disaggregated resources, with an intelligent software stack.’
This investment demonstrates HPE’s commitment to silicon photonics as a way to overcome the challenges of solving
the memory bottleneck for future high-performance computing systems, such as those found in HPC and AI. The added benefit of using silicon photonics technologies is the potential to use the high-bandwidth networking capabilities of optical I/O to support the development of disaggregated computing architectures.
Photonics underpins next- generation computing Ayar Labs’ current technology consists of the optical I/O chiplet, TeraPHY, and a light source called SuperNova. The light source provides up to 16 wavelengths of light, powering up to 16 ports. SuperNova is a multi-wavelength, multi- port, remote light source with 64 wavelengths for advanced integrated optics applications, including AI, optical computing, and optical I/O wave division multiplexing (WDM). The optical source is compliant with the CW-WDM MSA 400 GHz wavelength grid and operates uncooled from 15 to 100°C. The multi-wavelength
@electrooptics |
www.electrooptics.com
jamesteohart/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
