IBM researchers have found a way to bring ‘breakthrough’ high-speed optical connectivity to data centres, which will help to meet ever-increasing AI demands.
- Schneider and NVIDIA Co-Develop AI-Ready Data Centre Solutions
- AWS Unlocks AI Power with Datacentre Innovations
- Google Signs Nuclear Energy Deal to Power its AI Data Centres
The US multinational tech company, IBM, have created a new process for co-packaged optics (CPO) that enables connectivity at the “speed of light” to work alongside existing electrical wiring.
This technology could result in increased energy efficiency in data centres, lower costs to scale AI usage, and accelerated AI processing.
IBM Research Engineer John Knickerbocker, explained in an IBM blog post why this is such a major breakthrough: “Large language models have made AI very popular these days across the tech industry.
“And the resulting growth of LLMs — and generative AI more broadly — is requiring exponential growth in high-speed connections between chips and data centres.
“The big deal is not only that we’ve got this big density enhancement for communications on module, but we’ve also demonstrated that this is compatible with stress tests that optical links haven’t been passing in the past.
Knickerbocker continued: “We’ll also be working with the component suppliers to position them for this next step of technology, as well as positioning them for the ability to support production quantities, not just prototypes.”
‘80 Times Faster’
Currently, fibre optic technology can transport data long distances at high speed, using light as opposed to electricity to manage most of the world’s communications.
Despite this, most data centres still use copper-based electrical wires in their racks. Theses wires, in turn, connect GPU accelerators which cause huge amounts of drag on the process as they spend the majority of the time waiting for data from other devices.
As an IBM Research LinkedIn post quoted Knickerbocker as saying: “Even the most capable semiconductor components are only as fast as the connections between them.”
The added expense and energy requirements can be bypassed with IBM’s new CPO prototype module that can deliver the speed and capacity of optics into data centres.
IBM’s paper explains that the high bandwidth density optical structures combined with the transmission of multiple wavelengths per optical channel has the capacity to increase bandwidth between chips by up to 80 times more than electrical connections.
Moreover, chipmakers could add six time the number of optical fibres at the edge of a silicon photonics chip, IBM states in its related press release. Each of these fibres could range from centimetres to hundreds of metres in length and pass terabits of data per second.
Dario Gil, SVP and Director of Research at IBM, pointed to the need for data centre efficiency solutions such as this: “As generative AI demands more energy and processing power, the data centre must evolve – and co-packaged optics can make these data centres future-proof.
“With this breakthrough, tomorrow’s chips will communicate much like how fibre optics cables carry data in and out of data centres, ushering in a new era of faster, more sustainable communications that can handle the AI workloads of the future.”
Researchers at IBM designed, modelled and simulated work for CPO in Albany, New York.
IBM describes itself as a “leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise”.
