By: Maurice Steinman, SVP Product Strategy and GM US, Lightelligence
The CXL Consortium, supported by leading industry players, is continuing to evolve CXL technology to support compute and memory intensive workloads for business-critical applications.
Consortium member Lightelligence recently participated in a Q&A session to discuss the advantages of becoming a CXL Consortium member and the use cases for CXL technology.
Please introduce Lightelligence to the CXL community.
Founded in 2017, Lightelligence develops optical solutions to address the ever-increasing demands for performance across a broad computing landscape. With traditional electronic devices approaching their limits in geometry and power density, and performance requirements growing at an exponential pace, an alternative solution is required. Lightelligence develops optical products to overcome the performance and scalability limitations of purely electronic solutions.
What prompted Lightelligence to join the CXL Consortium?
We saw an opportunity for optical technology to address the growing need for composability in the data center. The CXL protocol was developed to satisfy the communications requirements for systems that are composed of disaggregated components. With our Photowave™ optical networking product line, we pioneered inter-rack optical CXL connectivity, so it was a natural and strategic fit for us to join the CXL Consortium as a Contributor member.
What are the main advantages of becoming a CXL Consortium member? How does Lightelligence participate or plan to participate?
Since we create fabric products that connect devices through their CXL interfaces, it’s critical that we align technically with the other players in the value chain. Becoming a CXL Consortium member was the best way to align with the industry and advance requirements that are unique to optical solutions.
Are there any use cases you feel will be ideal targets for CXL technology?
Resource disaggregation, particularly the use of pooled memory is an ideal target for CXL technology. By using optical networking to efficiently reach physically distant memory pools over CXL, computing and memory resources can be provisioned across multiple racks. This enables the greatest levels of composability and resource efficiency in the data center.
Which market segments do you believe will benefit most from CXL deployment?
We anticipate the greatest adoption by hyperscaler data centers where the economic benefits of resource pooling without compromises in performance or service level are paramount.
How is CXL impacting your business?
We’re able to provide our customers with optical interconnect solutions for the disaggregated data center. Since becoming a pervasive standard in servers, CXL has enabled us to rapidly deploy our solution to our partners and customers. This is an exciting time for the industry, and we are thrilled to be part of it.