Flash Memory Summit: Gen-Z Consortium Demonstrated First Multi-Vendor Technology for Memory-Centric Computing

The Gen-Z Consortium has announced the Gen-Z multi-vendor technology demonstration, connecting compute, memory, and I/O devices at Flash Memory Summit.

Gen-Z technology enables increased performance and scalability for existing enterprise applications and future memory-centric computing applications.

The demonstration utilized FPGA-based Gen-Z adapters connecting compute nodes to memory pools through a Gen-Z switch, creating a fabric connecting multiple server vendors and a variety of memory vendors. The multi-vendor participation reflects industry support for Gen-Z and showcased how future data centers can leverage this technology to attain a unified, performance and scalable fabric/interconnect. Additionally, a separate demonstration showed the scalable prototype connector defined by the Gen-Z Consortium, running at 112 giga-transfers/second.

“At Bloomberg, we provide information that powers the global capital markets and our customers depend on us to quickly deliver accurate data, despite exponentially increasing volumes,” said Justin Erenkrantz, head, compute architecture, finance, media and tech company based in New York City. “Gen-Z’s memory-centric standards-based approach will allow us to bring even more powerful analytics to our customers through a distributed memory and compute fabric.“

“We are excited to showcase the first technology demonstration of Gen-Z that includes solutions from multiple member companies, including a variety of servers, memory and I/O devices, all connected with a Gen-Z fabric,” said Kurtis Bowman, president, Gen-Z Consortium. “The consortium continues to meet the planned development schedule and we expect to see initial Gen-Z products in the 2019-2020 timeframe. As an open consortium, we encourage all companies to join us in our collaborative effort to develop the architecture and products that will provide the performance required for housing and analyzing the incredible amount of information coming into the data center.“

The Gen-Z Consortium has doubled its member base since inception and now includes more than 40 companies. It has released four draft specifications to date, all of which are available openly on its website:

Consortium members
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Gen-Z is an open systems interconnect designed to provide memory semantic access to data and devices via direct-attached, switched or fabric topologies. The consortium is made up of computer industry companies dedicated to creating and commercializing a new data access technology. The consortium’s 12 initial members were; AMD, ARM, Broadcom, Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Huawei, IDT, Micron, Samsung, SK hynix, and Xilinx with that list expanding as reflected on member List.

Resources:
Gen-Z member list