Alibaba, Apple Join Group Seeking to Create Standards for GPU Interconnection

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (NYSE: BABA)’s Alibaba Cloud, Apple, and Synopsys have joined the board of an industry group working to create an open GPU interconnectivity standard. Composed of many of the biggest players in the global data center and semiconductor segments, the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium was founded last year with the aim of developing standards to enhance multiple GPU interconnectivity.

UALink has expanded its Board of Directors to include the three tech firms. The companies will now be involved in the consortium’s efforts to further develop its technology as it works toward the launch of UALink’s Version 1.0 standard in Q1 2025. Apple Director of Platform Architecture Becky Loop said the consortium had shown a lot of promise in dealing with GPU connectivity challenges and ‘creating new opportunities’ for enhancing the demands and capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI).

Loop noted that Apple has an extended history of innovating, both by itself and in collaboration with other companies, and that the American tech giant is excited to join the Board of Directors at UALink. The consortium’s technology will enhance AI capabilities by consolidating computing power across multiple GPUs into powerful clusters.

Aided by GPU interconnection technology, these clusters are meant to help cluster operators scale their capacity and draw more computing power from their existing hardware with no impact on their current workloads. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly entrenched in various industries, attracting tens of billions of dollars worth of investment in the past couple of years alone, GPU interconnectivity will become even more important.

The UALink Consortium includes Meta, Google, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, and AWS. Its members are also involved with the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), another industry group that is working to increase Ethernet-based networking cooperation. Nvidia is the only big tech firm that won’t be joining UALink as its GPU interconnectivity technology will compete with Nvidia’s NVLink interconnect.

Alibaba Cloud Vice President and Alibaba Cloud Server Infrastructure general manager Qiang Liu says that as one of the leaders in the AI accelerator interconnector field, UALink Consortium is bringing key players in the AI infrastructure segment together to collaborate on an interconnection protocol for artificial intelligence accelerators. Defining the interconnect protocol could help drive AI infrastructure innovation and boost AI workload execution efficiency, Liu adds, aiding in the creation of an industry ecosystem that prizes openness and innovation.

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