Samsung Electronics has achieved a significant milestone by successfully verifying Compute Express Link™ (CXL™) memory operations in a real user environment with Red Hat, a leading open-source software provider.
The demand for systems with increased memory bandwidth and capacity has surged due to the exponential growth in data throughput and memory requirements for emerging technologies such as generative AI, autonomous driving, and in-memory databases (IMDBs).
To address these demands, CXL serves as a unified interface standard connecting various processors, including CPUs, GPUs, and memory devices, through a PCIe® interface. This solution addresses limitations in existing systems related to speed, latency, and expandability.
“Samsung has been working closely with a wide range of industry partners in areas from software, data centers and servers to chipset providers, and has been at the forefront of building up the CXL memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “Our CXL partnership with Red Hat is an exemplary case of collaboration between advanced software and hardware, which will enrich and accelerate the CXL ecosystem as a whole.”
In the latest development, Samsung has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9.3. The company successfully verified memory recognition, read, and write operations in Red Hat's KVM and Podman environments. This optimization ensures that data center clients can seamlessly integrate Samsung's CXL memory without requiring additional adjustments to their existing hardware configurations.
“The successful verification of Samsung’s CXL Memory Expander interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is significant because it opens up the applicability of the CXL Memory Expander to IaaS1 and PaaS2-based software provided by Red Hat,” said Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This is an important milestone in the integration of hardware and software to build an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.”
Samsung and Red Hat are actively collaborating on a "RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide" to assist users in effectively utilizing Samsung's CXL memory on RHEL 9.3 and constructing high-performance computing systems across diverse user environments.
The collaboration between the two companies began with the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in May 2022, focusing on next-generation memory. The ongoing partnership, facilitated through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC), includes the development of CXL open-source and reference models.
Encompassing a range of storage and memory products, such as NVMe SSDs, CXL Memory, computational memory/storage, and fabrics, this collaboration reflects the commitment of Samsung and Red Hat to advancing technology and innovation in the memory space.
