Establishing a Framework to Optimize Scale-up Interconnect for AI and HPC Clusters

DUBLIN, April 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Today, the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP), the nonprofit organization bringing hyperscale innovations to all, and the Ultra Accelerator Link™ (UALink™) Consortium announced a new collaboration to enhance scale-up interconnect performance in AI clusters and High-Performance Computing (HPC). The UALink Consortium is developing an open industry standard for high-performance accelerated compute scale-up interconnects tailored for AI and HPC workloads, while the OCP Community is actively designing sustainable, large-scale data center infrastructure with a focus on Open Systems for AI. Together, OCP and UALink aim to integrate UALink’s scale-up AI interconnect technology into OCP Community-delivered AI clusters, providing the high-bandwidth, low-latency, low-power connectivity required for high-performance AI training and inference.

“The rapid adoption of AI across industries, from autonomous systems to enterprise analytics, is driving unprecedented demand for scalable, high-performance AI infrastructure. This has created a pivotal moment for data center investments, with hyperscale operators deploying large-scale AI clusters to meet these needs. By collaborating, the UALink Consortium and the OCP Community can shape system specifications to address critical challenges in interconnect bandwidth and scalability posed by advanced AI models,” said George Tchaparian, CEO at the OCP Foundation.

Key aspects of the collaboration will focus on aligning OCP’s community-led infrastructure development with UALink’s interconnect innovations, ensuring seamless integration and shared objectives. The alliance will leverage the expertise of both organizations to advance scale-up AI interconnect performance. Following the release of UALink 1.0 Specification earlier this month, both organizations and their communities are setting up for collaboration across OCP’s Open Systems for AI Strategic Initiative and OCP’s Future Technologies Initiative Short-Reach Optical Interconnect workstream.

“AI and HPC workloads require ultra-low latency and massive bandwidth to handle the scale and complexity of accelerated compute data processing to meet LLM requirements. The UALink Consortium was formed to create an open standard for accelerated compute interconnects that meets these demands, enabling faster and more efficient data exchange. Partnering with the OCP Community will accelerate the adoption of UALink’s innovations into complete systems, delivering transformative performance for AI markets,” said Peter Onufryk, UALink Consortium President.

“The surge in generative AI and HPC applications is placing immense pressure on data center interconnects to deliver the bandwidth and responsiveness needed for training and inference. The alliance between OCP and UALink creates a powerful collaborative framework to develop and integrate advanced interconnect solutions, enhancing the performance of large-scale AI clusters. This alliance has the potential to redefine industry solutions for AI infrastructure,” said Sameh Boujelbene, VP at Dell’Oro Group.

About the Open Compute Project Foundation
The Open Compute Project (OCP) brings at-scale innovations and hyperscaler best practices to all, spanning technology domains from the data center to the edge, and the technology stack from silicon, to systems, to site facilities and services. The international OCP Community is made up of organizations and people from hyperscale and tier-2 cloud data center operators, communications providers, colocation providers, diverse enterprises, and technology vendors. With the tenets of openness, impact, efficiency, scale and sustainability, the OCP engages and educates thousands of engineers every year. Across many projects and initiatives the OCP Foundation and Community are meeting the market today and shaping the future.

Learn more at: www.opencompute.org.

About Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium
The Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Consortium, incorporated in October 2024, is the open industry standard group dedicated to developing the UALink specifications, a high-speed, scale-up accelerator interconnect technology that advances next-generation AI & HPC cluster performance. The consortium is led by a board made up of stalwarts of the industry; Alibaba, AMD, Apple, Astera Labs, AWS, Cisco, Google, HPE, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, and Synopsys. The Consortium develops technical specifications that facilitate breakthrough performance for emerging AI usage models while supporting an open ecosystem for data center accelerators. For more information on the UALink Consortium, please visit www.UALinkConsortium.org.

Ultra Accelerator Link and UALink are trademarks of the UALink Consortium. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts

Dirk Van Slyke
Open Compute Project Foundation
[email protected]
+1 303-999-7398

Nolan Morgan
UALink Consortium
+1 971-271-2657
[email protected]