Optical interconnects enabling 1 million XPU AI cluster era

Optical Interconnects Enabling 1 Million XPU AI Cluster Era

Since the start of Gen AI, the mantra is more is better.  More model parameters, more powerful accelerators (XPUs), more XPUs in clusters.  One year ago, the largest AI clusters were 25K.  Today it is 100K and 400K clusters are being built.  The race is already on to build the next 1 million XPU clusters.

In this talk, Dr Loi Nguyen will discuss the challenges and opportunities to build such massive AI clusters from the power, distance, and connectivity points of view.   Optical interconnects based upon silicon photonics, PAM4, and coherent technologies will play a critical role in enabling the connectivity within a rack, between racks, across a data center, and between multiple data centers.