The companies will team up on photonics research and commercial development for developing next-generation HPC and AI solutions
HPE through Hewlett Packard Pathfinder has made an undisclosed investment in Ayar Labs. (Credit: Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States/Wikimedia Commons)
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has entered into a multi-year collaboration with Ayar Labs, a photonic chip start-up, to develop silicon photonics solutions based on optical I/O technology.
According to the parties, the technologies will be developed to support future requirements for high performance computing (HPC) as well as artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.
Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard said: “HPE is the leader in advanced systems architectures for HPC, AI, and networking.
“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.”
Apart from the partnership, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, the venture arm of HPE, has made an undisclosed investment in Ayar Labs to expedite the joint development and adoption of future technologies.
HPE and Ayar Labs will team up on photonics research and commercial development to develop a joint ecosystem of solution providers, and customer engagements.
The focus of the collaboration will be on the photonic chip start-up’s development of high speed, high density, low power optical-based interconnects for targeting future generations of HPE Slingshot, which is a high performance Ethernet fabric designed specifically for HPC and AI solutions.
Through the combination of the technologies, the partners will be able to design next-generation high-performance networking solutions as well as novel disaggregated system architectures. These are said to be highly important for greater flexibility, efficiency, performance, and throughput to support data-intensive demands of workloads in the future.
HPE senior vice president and HPC and AI general manager Justin Hotard said: “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.
“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.”
Earlier this month, HPE joined forces with Qualcomm Technologies to deliver the next-generation 5G virtualised distributed unit (vDU) solutions, powered by the former’s Qualcomm X100 5G radio access network (RAN) inline accelerator card.