Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Ayar Labs have announced a multi-year strategic collaboration that will develop silicon photonics solutions based on optical I/O technology. The new development, announced last week, will support future requirements for high-performance computing and AI solutions.
As part of the collaboration, HPE and Ayar Labs will partner on photonics research and commercial development, building a joint ecosystem of solution providers, and customer engagements.
The two companies plan to develop capabilities that leverage optical I/O, which is a silicon photonics-based technology that uses light instead of electricity to transmit data, to integrate with HPE Slingshot, a purpose-built HPC and AI interconnect designed for next-generation technologies, such as the upcoming U.S. Department of Energy exascale supercomputers.
Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager, HPC and AI, at HPE, 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.”
Charles Wuischpard, CEO of Ayar Labs added: “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.”
Paul Glaser, vice president and head of Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, HPE’s venture arm, said: “Ayar Labs represents an exciting investment opportunity for Hewlett Packard Pathfinder as we closely support HPE’s HPC and AI initiatives. Ayar Labs optical I/O technology is highly differentiated and critical to the evolution of high-performance computing architectures.”
