Partnership to develop 100ns latency switch appliance portfolio

The new products are the result of work the two companies have conducted under the charter of the Open Compute Project (OPC) HPC group, which IDT co-chairs. The switch appliances leverage IDT's RapidIO technology, used in virtually every 4G LTE phone call and download made today.

RapidIO switches are used to connect computing components in complex processing-intensive systems, including SoCs, DSPs, FPGAs, GPUs and custom ASICs. IDT has shipped more than 110m ports of its 10-20Gb/s RapidIO switches for use in production networks. In addition to using the 2nd gen switches, the new appliance portfolio will deploy IDT’s recently announced RXS family of RapidIO switches, which enable ports running at up to 50Gb/s with less than 1.2W per port and 100ns latency.

Sailesh Chittipeddi, CTO and Vice President of global operations, IDT, commented: “The collaboration with IDT has been instrumental in winning computing and telco customers using our RapidIO- based servers and switch appliances. By combining IDT’s interconnect and market channels with the Prodrive team’s world-leading design and manufacturing done in the EU, we have already deployed 10-20Gb/s versions of the switch portfolio in tier 1 telco C-RAN programmes as well as top-tier European HPC-oriented data centres. The switch appliances, complete with Prodrive’s RapidIO-connected FPGA/Power/x86/ARM servers, are also attractive for financial trading applications.” 

The switch appliances feature scalable modularity with 32 to 96 ports supporting clustering at rack or multi-rack scale for target applications supporting heterogeneous processing with CPUs and accelerators. Multiple switch appliances can be connected in a leaf and spine network leveraging the RapidIO protocol to connect up to 64,000 processing nodes in a single network. Individual ports can be configured to run at a variety of speeds, including 1, 2.5, 5, 10, 20, 40 and 50Gb/s, and thus tuned to optimise overall system power consumption, depending on application workload.

"Taking an open and collaborative approach to developing solutions for Open Compute and OpenPOWER is accelerating and strengthening the development efforts of our broader open community. IDT is at the forefront as OpenPOWER grows capabilities into edge computing across system and switch resources," added Calista Redmond, President of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

The switch appliance products are available directly from Prodrive Technologies. The 20Gb/s-per-port versions are available now.  Lead customers can contact Prodrive for customised 50Gb/s-per-port solutions featuring IDT’s RXS RapidIO switches.