CXL Consortium member company UnifabriX recently participated in a Q&A session to discuss what prompted them to join the Consortium, its expertise, and exciting use cases for CXL technology.
Can you share a brief introduction of UnifabriX?
Founded in 2020, UnifabriX develops solutions that address the inefficiencies of large-scale system deployments, enabling datacenter operators to fully unlock their infrastructure’s speed, density, and scale. Our CXL-based products achieve exceptional performance and elasticity in bare-metal and virtualized environments over a wide range of applications, including the most demanding HPC, AI, ML, and big-data workloads. As an active contributor to the CXL standard, we are helping to lead the charge for development advancement.
UnifabriX is the maker of a performance-focused CXL® (Compute Express Link®) system and can demonstrate live HPC performance acceleration with memory pooling, sharing, and CXL 3.0 fabric, using industry-standard benchmarking. We recorded a live demonstration video recently at Supercomputing 2022 (SC’22) that allows viewers to experience the UnifabriX CXL®-based Smart Memory Node in action.
What prompted UnifabriX to join the CXL® Consortium?
Encouraging adoption of the fundamental technology innovations resulting from CXL requires broad industry collaboration across multiple disciplines. The Consortium provides an open arena that facilitates the evolution of CXL specifications, drives market education and awareness, and creates a synergy of ideas that fosters new use cases and applications. UnifabriX has welcomed the opportunity to work closely with partners and customers within the framework of the Consortium to empower CXL and help make it a reality.
What expertise does UnifabriX bring to the Consortium?
The UnifabriX team has extensive experience in system-level architecture, from ultra-low-latency fabric designs, to the creation of advanced IPUs and DPUs, and building large-scale complex systems across a broad stack of datacenter technologies. Our founders gained a unique set of expertise designing FlexBus, IAL (Intel Accelerator Link) and multi-socket interconnects that carry heterogeneous traffic of memory and IO. UnifabriX realizes that achieving the full potential of CXL requires system-level orchestration of multiple technologies and disciplines that are key to providing a superior workload performance and user experience. We are harnessing the CXL framework to remove architectural bottlenecks and roadblocks so that platform-level resources – in particular, compute and memory – are optimized for performance and efficiency. Our Resource Processing Unit® (RPU) unleashes the full power of CXL and PCIe to improve the utilization of the CPU and increase system-wide bandwidth. UnifabriX is the first to report on performance with standardized industry-renowned benchmarking tools and with its RPU, UnifabriX enables HPC and datacenter players to move beyond the limits of traditional physical memory, advancing the next generation of HPC performance.
We are excited to be part of this group of market leaders, sharing our technical expertise, and helping CXL gain industry-wide adoption.
What is the biggest advantage of CXL Consortium membership? How does UnifabriX participate?
Being a member of the CXL Consortium enables UnifabriX to be on the ground floor in helping to define the CXL standard, ensuring it is robust and applicable to a broad range of applications. Working side-by-side with our customers and understanding their challenges and applications gives us the opportunity to make sure that CXL can solve their problems.
We have dedicated our top-talents and considerable resources to take an active role in CXL technical working groups, leveraging our expertise and experience to influence and contribute to the development of CXL technology.
What use cases do you feel will be ideal targets for CXL technology? Which market segments do you believe will benefit most from CXL?
CXL offers datacenters a lifeline for overcoming the innovation gap between processors and memory, unlocking significant performance gains, and utilizing more CPU cores and compute density within the platform. Organizations that deploy CXL will finally experience an entirely novel way to structure datacenters and solve performance challenges and bottlenecks.
What does Unifabrix see as CXL’s impact within your industry?
CXL is a game-changing technology, revolutionizing datacenter architectures in the cloud and at the edge, creating novel paradigms of how memory is utilized and attached to CPUs, GPUs and XPUs, and paving the way for a broad set of emerging architectures.
The Unifabrix Smart Memory Node – based on CXL technology – introduces a new era of datacenter architectures and supports a fundamental transformation within memory systems. Our CXL 2.0 and CXL 3.0-based solutions address the insatiable, heterogeneous demand for greater memory and storage capacity, bandwidth, and computing power simultaneously with unprecedented operational flexibility.