NEC Corp has expanded its work with Cornelis to deploy its high-performance networking solutions in Japan.
The Japanese giant has been evaluating the Cornelis CN5000 Omni-Path platform in Europe and will now bring the 400-gigabit-per-second platform to its homeland.
“Organizations across Japan are preparing for increasingly complex AI and HPC (high-performance computing) environments that require higher performance, scalability, and efficiency,” said Takeshi Hirose, senior director of NEC’s compute department. “Our collaboration with Cornelis broadens the high-performance networking technologies available to our customers while allowing us to evaluate next-generation capabilities that support future computing requirements.”
NEC also plans to be among the early evaluators of Cornelis’ upcoming 800-gigabit CN6000 platform, which will be Ultra Ethernet-compliant in addition to the vendor’s traditional Omni-Path offerings.
An early glimpse of the next-gen line last November in the form of a hardware-accelerated SuperNIC sees support for RoCEv2 (remote direct memory access over converged Ethernet version 2), which would allow it to intuitively communicate directly with heterogeneous host systems and central processing unit (CPU) storage arrays at high speeds.
NEC will use the next-gen platform to evaluate future networking technologies for customers running AI training and inference workloads as well as high-performance computing deployments.
“NEC’s extensive experience delivering enterprise and HPC infrastructure throughout Japan makes them an outstanding partner as we continue giving customers more choice and bringing advanced networking technologies to new markets,” said Cornelis CEO Lisa Spelman. “Together, we’re helping customers build AI and HPC environments that deliver greater performance today while preparing for the next generation of large-scale computing.”
In an interview with SDxCentral in June, Spelman said Cornelis’ support for Ethernet at the transport layer would help customers address AI congestion and data movement challenges through smarter packet-routing.
“The industry is attracted to what Ethernet represents for the long haul, which is industry standards that multiple people can build on top,” the CEO said. “But the definition of what Ethernet means, as we move to Ultra Ethernet, starts to adapt a bit. You're seeing more capabilities like traffic management and not just congestion awareness, but congestion avoidance. Different styles and capabilities of features are evolving a lot.”