The word Fabrics is perhaps the most used or abused word in computing today. A Fabric is, as its name implies, a web of multiple devices in a cluster using some physical level connectivity with transport and protocol layers built on top of it. Computing in general, and High Performance Computing in particular have moved over the years from proprietary cluster interconnects to more popularly, Infiniband and Ethernet.
In the AI era, the focus has shifted towards communication fabrics due to growing demands of HPC and AI at scale. When it comes to connecting GPUs with each other, NVLink has been the most popular communication fabric. However, there have been recent advancements in this space with the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link or UALink, consortium to connect accelerators and switches in AI computing pods with low latency/high bandwidth and supporting simple load-store semantics. The Ultra Ethernet Consortium or UEC is working to enhance Ethernet to build a low latency, lossless variant to serve the needs of the AI era. Scale Up Ethernet or SUE, provides a framework to provide low latency, high bandwidth connectivity for XPU scale up networks based on Ethernet.
Compute Express Link or CXL, is a memory semantic fabric that has been developed to solve multiple challenges in computing related to capacity and bandwidth of memory, as well as the need to disaggregate memory. With the introduction of Unordered IO (UIO), the ubiquitous PCI Express protocol is also looking to add fabric capabilities.
The second edition of the High Performance Fabrics workshop will be a half-day event with the aim of exploring the novel research ideas around this very rich space of fabrics and the research happening in operating systems, virtualization and manageability in related areas.
The workshop includes keynotes from industry and/or academia experts, panel discussion and selected paper presentations. Papers shortlisted for workshop presentation are published as part of HiPCW proceedings on IEEE. The presentations must be done in person. The detailed program will be shared closer to the event.
The agenda and other details of the first edition of the High Performance Fabrics Workshop can be found at https://2024.hipc.org/fabrics-workshop/
The workshop invites original, high quality research papers as well as case studies and practical experiences with Fabrics. Papers are solicited from the area, but not limited to the following-
Workshop paper submissions should follow the IEEE conference template (double-column format, 10-pt font on 8.5″×11″ pages). The templates are available at https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html>