Kalray teams for multicore storage card in cloud and edge

The K200-LP from Kalray is based on the multicore MPPA processor and optimised for NVMe- and NVMe-oF-based memory storage.

French multicore AI chip designer Kalray has launched an accelerator card for cloud and edge data centres built by Taiwanese EMS Wistron.

The K200-LP is based on Kalray’s MPPA 80 core processor and optimised for low power operation with the latest NVMe memory systems.

The low profile, 2x 100GB ethernet, PCIe Gen4 card delivers over 2 MIOPS and 12 GB/s per card (both RoCE and TCP) with a latency down to 20us. The 80 64-bit VLIW processing cores in the MPPA3 Coolidge processor on the card are distributed among five clusters with eight 25Gbit/s Ethernet and 16x PCIe Gen4 interfaces and consume from 20 to 60W runnig at 1.2GHz. Each VLIW core has a tightly coupled tensor co-processor for AI acceleration.

The explosion of data, driven by demanding services and applications using AI and data analytics, is putting a lot of pressure on cloud and edge data centre networking and storage to feed the demanding compute intensive resources. The primary needs are to reduce latency, enhance bandwidth and IO operations performance as well as offloading host CPUs.

Most advanced All-Flash-Array solutions today use multiple adapter cards around a x86 that runs storage services. The Kalray MPPA chip runs all the critical functions of a disaggregated storage appliance on one single device, reducing the power consumption and improving the latency.

Whereas the industry has defined a new NVMe protocol to support the latest generation of ultra-fast storage devices, existing traditional technologies are not capable of exposing the full capability of NVMe-based SSDs. Kalray’s K200-LP smart storage card has been built from the ground-up to support those breaking through data protocols.

“We are proud to unveil our new K200-LP acceleration card, based on our MPPA processor. This family of Ethernet/PCIe acceleration cards are natively capable of managing multiple workloads with no bottleneck to enable smarter, more efficient, and energy-wise applications on Cloud and Edge data centres,” said Eric Baissus, President and CEO of Kalray.

The Kalray K200-LP smart storage card and associated tools are available now.