Samsung Electronics today introduced open-source software solution, the Scalable Memory Development Kit (SMDK), designed to support the Compute Express Link (CXL) memory platform.
Earlier in May, Samsung unveiled the CXL memory expander that allows memory capacity and bandwidth to scale to levels far exceeding what is possible in today’s server systems. Now, the company’s CXL platform is being extended beyond hardware to offer easy-to-integrate software tools, making CXL memory much more accessible to data centre system developers for emerging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and 5G-edge markets.
The CXL interconnect is an open, industry-backed standard that enables different types of devices such as accelerators, memory expanders and smart I/O devices to work more efficiently when processing high-performance computational workloads.
“In order for data centre and enterprise systems to smoothly run next-generation memory solutions like CXL, development of corresponding software is a necessity,” said Cheolmin Park, vice president of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics.
Samsung said its SMDK enables the main memory and the CXL memory expander to work together seamlessly in heterogeneous memory systems.
The extensive software kit consists of libraries — sets of pre-built, reusable codes — and application programming interfaces (APIs) — the connections to access these software codes. Using the SMDK, system developers can easily incorporate CXL memory into advanced IT systems without having to modify existing application environments, or alternatively use it to optimise application software settings to suit special system needs.
The new SMDK also supports memory virtualisation, allowing system designers to efficiently manage an expanded memory pool in shared memory architectures.
Samsung said its SMDK is now available on a limited basis for initial testing and optimisation and will be open-sourced within the first half of next year.
