Chris Blackburn – Astera Labs

Bio: Chris Blackburn is the Director of Field Applications Engineering at Astera Labs. He works closely with the leading hyperscalers and cloud builders on their interconnect technologies to enable next generation system architectures. His experience with PCIe, CXL, and Ethernet helps shape large scale hardware acceleration clusters being built to support generative AI. When Chris isn’t on his PC he can be found adventuring throughout the great pacific northwest.

Presentation Abstract: The relentless demand for artificial intelligence (AI) is driving cloud service providers to deploy ever-increasing clusters of GPUs and custom accelerators. As these deployments scale, system architectures must evolve to balance cost, performance, power, and reliability. A critical aspect of this evolution is the high-speed signaling that connects the various components. This presentation delves into the high-speed protocols such as PCIe, CXL, UALink, Ethernet, Ultra Ethernet, exploring their intended use cases and evaluating where these protocols are complementary or competitive. Additionally, the presentation will address the evolving Scale-Up and Scale-Out architecture, highlighting their respective protocols and interconnect solutions. Special attention will be given to the adoption of Ethernet as a problem-solving technology in AI-driven environments. Through this discussion, we aim to provide a comprehensive overview of the options available and justify their use in modern cloud service architectures.