Gen-Z: An Open Memory Fabric for Future Data Processing Needs

Russ Herrell, Gen-Z Consortium
Russ Herrell is a Distinguished Technologist and has been with HPE for almost 38 years. Russ has a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Montana State University and has worked at HPE ever since leaving campus. Russ has designed ECC memory boards, 3D graphics accelerators, virtual DMA interfaces, interrupt driven flow controlled, load/store graphics library interfaces, and 16-64 socket SMP big iron. Most recently Russ has been working to enable the Gen-Z and Memory Driven Compute ecosystem.

With the evolution of advanced workloads like AI and machine learning, the need for new memory system architectures that include memory expansion, memory sharing, and disaggregated memory continues to increase. Gen-Z is a new fabric architecture that utilizes memory-semantic communications to move data between memories on different components with minimal overhead. Gen-Z fabric is highly scalable and composable, allowing day-to-day reconfiguration and reallocation of resources desired by hyperscale data center operators. Gen-Z also provides advanced fabric security built around access and region keys. To enable its full functionality, Gen-Z memory fabric involves switching, routing, security, zoning, access control and fabric management. The core properties of Gen-Z fabric consist of scalable and provisioned memory infrastructure; shared memory for data processing; connectivity of processors, GPUs, accelerators, and optimized engines; next-generation DRAM, FLASH and storage class memory; and enabling persistent memory. The Gen-Z Consortium is committed to a robust, open ecosystem, and has released a suite of Gen-Z specifications to address the unique needs of the industry. The Gen-Z Fabric Management Specification will be available for public download on the Consortium’s website soon. In this presentation, attendees will learn about Gen-Z Fabric Management and its numerous benefits to the high-performance fabrics industry.