Drut tackles disaggregation at a data centre scale

• Drut’s DynamicXcelerator supports up to 4,096 accelerators using optical switching and co-packaged optics. Four such clusters enable the scaling to reach 16,384 accelerators.
• The system costs less and is cheaper to run, has lower latency, and better uses the processors and memory.
• The system is an open design supporting CPUs and GPUs from different vendors. 
• DynamicXcelerator will ship in the second half of 2024.

Bill Koss (L) and Jitender Miglani.

Drut Technologies has detailed a system that links up to 4,096 accelerator chips. And further scaling, to 16,384 GPUs, is possible by combining four such systems in ‘availability zones’.

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The APC’s blueprint for silicon photonics

The Advanced Photonics Coalition (APC) wants to smooth the path for silicon photonics to become a high-volume manufacturing technology.

Jeffery Maki

The organisation is talking to companies to tackle issues whose solutions will benefit the photonics technology.

The Advanced Photonics Coalition wants to act as an industry catalyst to prove technologies and reduce the risk associated with their development, says Jeffery Maki, Distinguished Engineer at Juniper Networks and a member of the Advanced Photonics Coalition's board.

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Books of 2023 - Final part

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the final part, contributions are from Larry Dennison, Tim Doiron, Catherine White and Neil McRae.

Larry Dennison, Network Research Group, Nvidia

At this point in my life, book reading is to unwind and is mostly fiction. I get nearly everything else from reading selected technical papers, the daily news and Real Clear Politics. There is just so much cognitive dissonance in the news and editorials that I retreat into fantasy for some down-time.

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Broadcoms taps AI to improve switch chip traffic analysis

Broadcom's Trident 5-X12 networking chip is the company's first to add an artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing engine.

The latest Trident, Tomahawk, and Jericho devices. Source: Broadcom.

Data centre operators can use their network traffic to train the chip's neural network. The Trident 5's inference engine, dubbed the Networking General-purpose Neural-network Traffic-analyzer or NetGNT, is loaded with the resulting trained model to classify traffic and detect security threats.

"It is the first time we have put a neural network focused on traffic analysis into a chip," says Robin Grindley, principal product line manager with Broadcom's Core Switching Group.

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Books of 2023 - Part 3

Gazettabyte has been asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 3, Noam Mizrahi, Katharine Schmidtke, Steve Suarez, and Vladimir Kozlov share their readings of the year.

Noam Mizrahi, EVP, corporate CTO at Marvell.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek is a book about the obvious. It is so obvious, in fact, that it is very hard to do. We all want our message to get through so that people understand, see things through our eyes and share our vision.

When we start a journey, we know very well why we do it. This is also when we inspire and motivate the most, ourselves and others. But, as we develop our company, products and careers, intuitively, routine makes us focus on what we do and how we do it, and in some (or many) cases, we forget why we do it.

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Books of 2023 - Part 2

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In Part 2, Alan Liu, Yves LeMaitre, and, in this case, the editor of Gazettabyte list their recommended reads.

A foreign cathedral .... in RennesAlan Liu, CEO & Co-Founder at Quintessent Inc.

One book that left a deep impression on me is Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, a recounting and reflection by the author of his time as a prisoner in various concentration camps during WWII.

I listened to the audiobook mostly during commutes to work at the beginning of the year. Whatever challenges awaited me for the day, no matter how big, they seemed less daunting when reframed against the book's stories.

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Books in 2023

Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. William Koss, Dean Bubley and Scott Wilkinson kick off this year's recommended reads.

William R Koss, CEO at Drut Technologies

My 2023 reading list is less than normal as the year has been full of technical reading and presentation materials for work. I enjoy history books as well as business history that tell the rise and fall of some company, industry or person.

In Progress 

Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring by Gordon Prange: I picked this book out of Amazon's recommendation list. Gordon Prange being the author of At Dawn We Slept and Tora, Tora, Tora. Currently plowing through this book that was unfinished at the time of his death.

The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land by Thomas Asbridge. My knowledge of the Crusades was thin and I was looking for a book that provided a grand overview. So far it has not disappointed, but I have had to familiarize myself with many new names.

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