GigaIO Debuts PCIe Gen5 Optical I/O, Paving the Way for Large-scale AI Deployments

San Diego, California, March 26, 2024 – GigaIO, the award-winning provider of open workload-defined infrastructure for AI and accelerated computing, today announced the launch of the industry’s first PCIe Gen5 QSFP-DD optical cables at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in San Diego. Optical cables delivering PCIe Gen5 x8 lanes (data channels within a single PCIe slot) provide several key advantages over traditional copper coax cables, which are limited to just three meters in length. Optical cables can be significantly longer in length, facilitating larger deployments of GigaIO’s groundbreaking SuperNODE^TM — the world’s first 32 GPU single-node supercomputer — and feature an 8-lane link that can be aggregated to 16 lanes, allowing more information to  be transmitted via a single cable.

The award-winning SuperNODE was named Best AI Product or Technology and one of the Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch by the editors of HPCwire at Supercomputing 2023 in November. It leverages GigaIO’s PCIe AI memory fabric, FabreX^TM, to provide access to dozens or even hundreds of GPUs and other compute resources across a single node. Being able to aggregate PCIe Gen5 x16 links in order to carry signals tens of meters along longer cables allows for multiple SuperNODEs and 64-GPU SuperDuperNODEs to be clustered together across data center racks. As deployments will no longer be limited to just a few racks apiece by the use of copper cabling, clients will be able to take advantage of far greater compute bandwidth.

GigaIO’s partners in this endeavor are Amphenol, which is providing the optical cable technology, and Microchip, contributing PCIe switching chips and firmware. “We are excited to collaborate with Amphenol and Microchip to expand the types of locations where SuperNODE and SuperDuperNODEs can be deployed,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. Sam Kocsis, Directory of Standards and Technologies at Amphenol, agrees. “Amphenol is delighted to help enable new platform architectures by extending the physical reach of PCIe links with optical interconnect solutions,“ he said.

“Microchip PCIe switches, combined with Amphenol’s optical I/O, permit scaling of GigaIO’s AI computing systems to tackle the extremely large size of models created by generative AI and other novel AI applications,” noted Samer Haija, Director of Marketing for Microchip’s data center solutions business unit.
With the launch of Gen5 optical cables, FabreX is positioned to be the first PCIe Gen5 opticallyconnected fabric on the market. Gen4 copper-based connectivity limited fabric size to just two or three datacenter racks, whereas Gen5 optical cables can aggregate up to x16 PCIe lanes and span much longer distances. A FabreX Gen5 optical solution provides GigaIO’s AI, Machine Learning, and HPC customers with the ability to build larger clusters across multiple datacenter racks without being limited by cable length. Larger fabrics afford new AI and HPC workflows the ability to harness even greater amounts of accelerators, storage, and memory, and allow for the deployment of new AI GPU clouds that span thousands of GPUs, such as TensorWave’s TensorNODE.

Another benefit of using PCIe Gen5 optical cables is the ability to widen the range of data centers where SuperNODES can be deployed. Given that GPU-intensive computing requires tremendous power, and some data centers have power and cooling limitations per rack, multiple SuperNODEs might typically need to be spread across multiple racks in order to sufficiently distribute their power requirements. With Gen5 optical cables, clients will no longer be constrained to deploying only in data centers without power and cooling limitations, as longer optical cables now allow for connecting SuperNODEs across racks.

PCIe Gen5 QSFP-DD optical cables will be broadly available this summer, as will GigaIO’s PCIe Gen5 FabreX. Visit Amphenol’s booth (#2513) at the Optical Fiber Conference in San Diego March 26-28, for a demonstration of this new technology optically connecting Microchip PCIe Gen5 switches. Further details on the collaboration between GigaIO and Microchip can be found in this case study on the Microchip website, as well as in this white paper.

About GigaIO

GigaIO provides workload-defined infrastructure through its universal dynamic memory fabric, FabreX, which seamlessly composes rack-scale resources and integrates natively into industry-standard tools. The SuperNODE and the SuperDuperNODE are “impossible servers,” fully engineered to “Just Work” for AI and accelerated computing. These solutions allow users to deploy systems in hours instead of months and run more workloads at lower cost through higher utilization of resources and more agile deployment. Visit www.gigaio.com, or follow on Twitter (X) and LinkedIn.

Contact

Danica Yatko 760-487-8395
danica@xandmarketing.com