Intel unveils data center GPU with open source management software

Intel announced Rialto Bridge, a data center graphics processing unit (GPU) offering up to 160 Xe cores, more FLOPs, more I/O bandwidth and higher TDP limits for significantly increased density, performance and efficiency. It uses the same architecture as the Intel data center GPU Ponte Vecchio and adds enhanced tiles with Intel's next process node.

Intel said the next major architecture innovation on its roadmap will be Falcon Shores, bringing x86 CPU and Xe GPU architectures together into a single socket. This architecture is targeted for 2024 and projected to deliver benefits of more than 5x performance-per-watt, 5x compute density, 5x memory capacity and bandwidth improvements.

Jeff McVeigh, vice president and general manager of the Super Compute Group at Intel Corporation, writes: 

"As the data center and HPC workloads increasingly move toward disaggregated architectures and heterogeneous computing, we will need tools that can help us effectively manage these complex and diverse computing environments."

Today, we are introducing Intel XPU Manager, an open-source solution for monitoring and managing Intel data center GPUs locally and remotely. It was designed to simplify administration, to maximize reliability and uptime by running comprehensive diagnostics, to improve utilization and to perform firmware updates."

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/accelerated-innovations-sustainable-open-hpc.html

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Marvell samples Ethernet switch for next gen automobiles

Marvell is sampling its third generation Brightlane Ethernet Switch for automobiles.

The latest Marvell Brightlane family, which includes 9-port and 16-port versions, is designed for Ethernet-based zonal architectures in next generation car designs. 

The new switch features IEEE 802.1AE-2018-compliant Media Access Control security (MACsec) protocols and an embedded Hardware Security Module (eHSM) for software authentication and data encryption. It also integrates 10Base-T1S capabilities, along with 100/1000Base-T1 PHYs, 2.5G/10G SerDes and PCIe Gen3 ports.

In addition, the Brightlane Ethernet Switch supports the latest Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards to reduce latency and ensure quality of service (QoS) for essential vehicular connectivity, including the IEEE 802.1CB standard for data redundancy.

“The move to software-defined vehicles (SDVs) is a rapidly emerging megatrend in the automotive industry because software-centric architectures not only will enable over-the-air software updates for existing in-vehicle systems, but they will make possible entirely new aftermarket services and applications to continuously improve safety and driving experiences over time,” said Ian Riches, vice president for the Global Automotive Practice, Strategy Analytics. “As a result, security and safety is foundational to these networks, and Marvell’s new secure managed Ethernet switch integrates all the essential elements to drive the SDV revolution forward.”

“As the newest Brightlane Ethernet switch in our portfolio, this innovative design is targeted at the core need to ensure the security of next-generation in-vehicle networks and the data they carry,” said Mike Yeager, vice president and general manager, Automotive Business Unit, Marvell. “Our end-to-end optimization for software-defined, zonal architectures, advanced security, increased bandwidth and PHY integration is driving design win momentum for Marvell’s Ethernet products among top auto manufacturers and OEM partners.”

https://www.marvell.com/company/newsroom/marvell-introduces-industry-first-automotive-ethernet-switch-with-wockstep-dual-core-reliability-for-safer-vehicles.html

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AMD completes its $1.9 billion acquisition of Pensando

AMD completed its previously-acquisition of Pensando Systems in a transaction valued at approximately $1.9 billion. 

Pensando’s distributed services platform will expand AMD’s data center product portfolio with a high-performance data processing unit (DPU) and software stack that are already deployed at scale across cloud and enterprise customers including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.  The Pensando team will join the AMD Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod. 

“The data center remains one of the largest growth opportunities for AMD. The addition of the Pensando Systems team with their hardware and software portfolio will enables us to offer cloud, enterprise and edge customers a broader portfolio of leadership compute engines that can be optimized for their specific workloads,” said AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. “Pensando’s leadership DPU complements our data center product portfolio, enabling AMD to offer solutions that can significantly accelerate data transfer speeds while providing additional levels of security and analytics that will play a larger role in defining the performance of next-generation data centers.”

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/pensando-acquisition

AMD to acquire Pensando for its DPU + software stack

Monday, April 04, 2022  AMD, Pensando, SmartNICs, Start-Ups, Xilinx  

AMD agreed to acquire Pensando, a Silicon Valley start-up offering a software-defined edge services platform powered by a custom packet processor, for approximately $1.9 billion before working capital and other adjustments. 

Pensando ("thinking" in Spanish) is led by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team — Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond. Its platform is designed to accelerate networking, security, storage and other services for cloud, enterprise and edge applications. Its architecture leverages the programmable packet processor distributed throughout a network to efficiently accelerate multiple infrastructure services simultaneously, offloading workloads from the CPU and increasing overall system performance. The company says it can achieve between 8x and 13x greater performance compared to competitive solutions.

Pensando claims multiple deployments at scale across cloud and enterprise customers, including Goldman Sachs, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud. 

CEO Prem Jain and the Pensando team will join AMD as part of the Data Center Solutions Group, led by AMD Senior Vice President and General Manager Forrest Norrod. Pensando will remain focused on executing their product and technology roadmaps, now with additional scale to accelerate their business and address growing market opportunities across a broader number of customers.

http://pensando.io

Pensado emerges from stealth, led by "MPLS" team from Cisco

Wednesday, October 16, 2019  Edge, Start-Ups  

Pensando Systems, a start-up based in San Jose, California, emerged from stealth to unveil its first product -- a software-defined edge services platform that was developed in collaboration with the world’s largest cloud, enterprise, storage, and telecommunications companies.

Pensando ("thinking" in Spanish) is led by Cisco’s legendary “MPLS” team — Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, Soni Jiandani and Randy Pond. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners led a Series C round to raise up to $145 million in funding. This will bring the total amount raised to $278 million after an earlier founder-led series A round of $71 million, and a customer-led series B round of $62 million. Cited customers, investors, and partners including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp, and Equinix.

The Pensando platform is a custom programmable processor optimized to execute a software stack delivering cloud, compute, networking, storage and security services wherever data is located, all managed via its Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller. The platform delivers highly programmable software-defined cloud, compute, networking, storage, and security services wherever data is located.

The platform promises an improved security posture through distributed network protection and east-west security. It offloads networking and security functions at wire speed to dedicated accelerators, and it is designed to scale to > 1000 tenants per server and >1M routes.

The company claims its capability means that cloud providers can now gain a technological advantage over the current market leader, Amazon Web Services Nitro, delivering 5-9x improvements in productivity, performance, and scale when compared to current architectures with no risk of lock-in.

The portfolio includes:

• Naples 100 and Naples 25 cards for installation in standard servers. The Naples Distributed Services Card (DSC) delivers high-performance cloud, compute, networking, storage and security functions. 
• Venice Centralized Policy and Services Controller - Centrally-managed enterprise-grade security and visibility at every level of the stack enables seamless distribution of all infrastructure services policies to active Naples nodes. In addition, Venice handles lifecycle management such as deploying in-service software upgrades to Naples nodes and delivers always-on telemetry, deep end-to-end observability, and operational simplicity across the environment. 

Pensando also announced that Mark Potter, chief technology officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Barry Eggers, a partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, joined the board of directors, with John Chambers, CEO of JC2 Ventures, leading as chairman.

http://pensando.io

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Orange Business Services debuts Service Manage-Watch

Orange Business Services introduced Service Manage-Watch, a global supervision solution for network services and applications for both Orange-provided and third-party services. Service Manage-Watch covers the entire enterprise’s IT ecosystem and is designed to ensure that connectivity and security at the edge, applications, equipment, and user experience are all performing at optimal levels.

Service Manage-Watch delivers end-to-end real-time visibility via a single dashboard. In addition, the service is bolstered by a team of dedicated experts at Orange Business Services to fine-tune the correlation rules and work closely with service desk agents for advanced troubleshooting adapted to the specific customer requirements. This continuously improves global IT performance supervision. Metrics from monitoring tools are harvested into the Orange Data Lake and correlated for analysis using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to generate proactive and predictive alerts.

"Service Manage-Watch adds genuine predictive AI power to Orange’s performance monitoring portfolio. Orange’s proven consultative capabilities will help businesses ensure that they are getting the best out of Service Manage-Watch’s capabilities. This launch strengthens Orange’s position as an independent cloud access aggregator and gives it differentiation versus hyperscalers," said Gary Barton, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Technology and Services, GlobalData.

“As both a telco-native company and an integrator, we provide the interface and manage the services, so we understand just how important performance can be to take a business from merely functioning to being outstanding when it comes to supporting business initiatives. Service Manage-Watch is a game-changer for enterprises focused on optimal performance, guaranteeing the availability of applications and networks, while enhancing decision making to increase productivity and user satisfaction. It is a key asset for our Multisourcing Service Integration (MSI) approach,” explained Daniel Bigagli, vice president, Enterprise Services at Orange Business Services.

https://www.orange-business.com/en/press/orange-business-services-unveils-service-manage-watch-supervise-performance-enterprise-it

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Source Photonics milestones: 2 million 28G EML chips shipped

Source Photonics announced a big milestone: it has surpassed shipment of more than two million 28G high speed EML laser chips for data centers and optical transmission applications. 

Source Photonics began production shipments of 28G EML with its 10km QSFP28 100G LR4 products since Q1 2020.

“We are excited to hit the two million milestone mark of 28G EML chips. Today’s announcement underlines our commitment and leadership in large-scale production capacity of high speed EML chip and transceiver products,” said John Wang, CEO of Source Photonics. “Vertical integration remains Source Photonics’ core competitiveness. More than 90% transceiver products transition to use our own optics chips now, including the newest 800G products under pre-production. We look forward to continue pushing the envelope to deliver higher speed EML laser chips for next generation transceivers”.

"Strong demand for 100/400G optics in mega data centers has been making headlines over the last 3 years, attracting many new suppliers and technologies,” commented Vladimir Kozlov, CEO and founder of LightCounting Market Research. “Source Photonics remains uniquely positioned to deliver its portfolio of 100G QSFP28 LR4 and higher performance transceiver products by vertical integration, which allows for faster deployment of next generation 100/400GbE optical solutions in enterprise, data center and service provider networks.”

https://www.sourcephotonics.com

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BT and Ericsson enter private 5G partnership

BT and Ericsson announced a multi-million-pound new partnership to provide commercial 5G private networks for the UK market.

Under a multi-year contract, BT will sell Ericsson's mobile network technology products to businesses and organizations in sectors such as manufacturing, defense, education, retail, healthcare, transport and logistics.

Marc Overton, Managing Director of BT’s Division X, part of its Enterprise business, said: “This UK-first deal we have signed with Ericsson is a huge milestone and will play a major role in enabling businesses’ transformation, ushering in a new era of hyper-connected spaces.

“We have combined our skill and expertise at building converged fixed and mobile networks with Ericsson’s leading, sustainable and secure 5G network equipment, to offer a pioneering new proposition that will be attractive to many industries. 5G private networks will also support smart factory processes and the advancement of Industry 4.0 which can realize significant cost savings and efficiencies for manufacturers.

Katherine Ainley, CEO Ericsson UK & Ireland said: “This ground-breaking agreement with BT means we are together taking a leading role in ensuring 5G has a transformative impact for the UK. The high quality, fast and secure connectivity provided by Ericsson Private 5G can help organizations make all-important efficiency gains that can create safer, more productive, and sustainable business operations and help the country build global leaders in the industries and technologies of the future.”

https://www.ericsson.com/en/press-releases/3/2022/bt-and-ericsson-sign-major-partnership-to-boost-growth-of-5g-private-networks

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Mitsubishi Electric develops optical receiver for space laser

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation has developed an optical receiver for use in laser communication terminals (LCTs). The prototype combines laser beams with a function to detect the direction of received beams in the 1.5-μm band, a general-purpose band used for terrestrial optical fiber communications and other applications. 

Mitsubishi Electric said its optical receiver integrates functions to detect both four phase changes of laser light and beam direction. The result is a downsized optical receiver that enables space optical communication with 10 times the speed, capacity and distance of radio-wave communication. Since the wavelength is much shorter, smaller antennas can be used in compact communication units.

A newly developed optical circuit for coherent space optical communication detects four phase changes (0, 90, 180, and 270 degrees) in contrast to conventional two-phase (0 and 180 degrees) detection. As a result, communication capacity and speed are double those of two-phase optical communication schemes in the same bandwidth and some 10 times those of radio-wave communication systems.

https://www.mitsubishielectric.com/news/2022/0531-a.html

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Lattice Semiconductor intros ORAN stack

Lattice Semiconductor introduced an ORAN solution stack addressing data security, fronthaul synchronization, and low power hardware acceleration for secure, adaptable, Open Radio Access Network (ORAN) equipment.

The Lattice ORAN solution stack offers:

• Zero trust security
• Authentication with real-time encryption and decryption functions.
• Ready-to-use software
• RISC-V software included to configure security functions.
• Tight synchronization for flexible fronthaul in future release
• IEEE 1588 protocol targeted to maintain the strict timing and synchronization requirements between the Radio Unit (RU) and Distribution Unit (DU) to support New Radio (NR) protocols including enhanced Common Public Radio Interface (eCPRI).
• Acceleration with low power and high reliability
• Up to 70 percent lower power and up to 100 times more resistant to soft errors in the smallest form factor than competing FPGAs of a similar class.

“Bringing low power, scalable, and secure solutions into networks has been Lattice’s continued priority in fast growing Communications market,” said Matt Dobrodziej, Vice President of Segment Marketing and Business Development at Lattice Semiconductor. “With its robust security features, the Lattice ORAN solution stack is a complete turnkey solution for 5G customers looking to secure data, accelerate network function, and achieve tight synchronization.”

http://www.latticesemi.com

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