Nvidia Acquires Mellanox to Accelerate Innovation; LightCounting Comments on Implications of the Deal for Optical Interconnect Technologies

The bottom line is that the deal will accelerate innovation and optical interconnects will be one of the areas impacted.

The deal emphasizes that combination of GPUs (Graphical Processing Units, made by Nvidia) with low latency switching and broadband interconnects (made by Mellanox) is the key for high performance computers (HPCs) and datacenter clusters running AI and machine learning applications. It is entirely possible that the inspiration for the Mellanox acquisition first began as Nvidia’s best engineers recently worked alongside Mellanox’s on both the reigning number 1 supercomputer Summit and the current number 2 supercomputer Sierra each of which use a proprietary interface called NVLink between the IBM Power9 CPUs and the Nvidia Volta GPUs at each node and high-speed Dual-Rail Mellanox 100G EDR InfiniBand connections between the individual CPU/GPU compute nodes. There are 4,608 CPU/GPU compute nodes in Summit and 4,474 such nodes in Sierra. Summit “only” fills up the space of two tennis courts but contains 185 miles of fiber optic connections.

Itching to find out whats next with poet.