Analog/Mixed Signal

Supercomputing 2023: Optical FPGA for HPC workloads debuts

08 November 2023

Looking to expand on an emerging building block for data-intensive high-performance computing (HPC) demands, optical chipmaker Ayar Labs will showcase its optical I/O solution integrated with Intel’s Agilex field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology.

The company will showcase the solution at the upcoming Supercomputing 2023.

The chip-to-chip silicon photonics device provides five times the bandwidth at five times the power and 20 times the lower latency compared to other devices, the company said. The device is packaged in a PCIe card form factor to handle applications like generative artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning and supports disaggregated compute and memory architectures.

“We’re on the cusp of a new era in high performance computing as optical I/O becomes a ‘must have’ building block for meeting the exponentially growing, data-intensive demands of emerging technologies like generative AI,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs.

Wuischpard said it is a concrete demonstration that optical I/O has reached the maturity and manufacturability to meet HPC computing.

At the show

During the conference, Ayar Labs will showcase optical FPGA consisting of two TeraPHY optical chiplets that are capable of 4 Tbps bi-directional bandwidth. These chiplets are connected to a 10 nm FPGA fabric die that supports 64 optical channels of high-speed, error-free communication across eight fibers on each chiplet.

Ayar Labs said the solution shows the benefits to emerging chiplet ecosystems with its integration optical I/O chiplets developed on GlobalFoundries’ Fotonix monolithic silicon photonics platform with the Intel FPGA.

Supercomputing 2023 takes place in Denver on November 12-17.

To contact the author of this article, email PBrown@globalspec.com


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