Gen-Z

As a millennial, everything in the media that ‘Gen Z’ does often gets lumped into the millennial category. Thankfully there’s another type of Gen-Z in the world: the cache coherent memory-semantic standard. Where standards like CXL are designed to work inside a node, CXL is meant to work between nodes, providing a switched fabric or a point-to-point connectivity for memory, storage, accelerators, and even other servers. Earlier this year we saw the announcement of a Gen-Z switch which provides a fabric backbone to which hardware can be connected. The switch allows for fabric management, switching, routing, and security, and allows hardware configuration mixes of storage, compute, and accelerators. We found one such add-on at this year’s Supercomputing: the ZMM, or Gen-Z Memory Module. What we had...