A3CUBE Introduces Brain Inspired In-Memory Network 

A3CUBE Inc. today announced a groundbreaking ‘brain inspired’ data plane encapsulated in a Network Interface Card (NIC) designed to bridge supercomputing benefits to the enterprise by dramatically transforming storage networking to eliminate the I/O performance gap between CPU power and data access performance for HPC, Big Data and data center applications.

The RONNIEE Express data plane profoundly elevates PCI Express from a simple interconnect to a new intelligent network fabric, leveraging the ubiquity and standardization of PCIe while solving its inherent performance bottlenecks. A3CUBE’s In-Memory Network technology, for the first time, allows direct shared non-coherent global memory across the entire network, enabling global communication based on shared memory segments and direct load/store operations between the nodes. The result is the lowest possible latency, massive scalability and disruptive performance that is orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of today’s network technologies including, Ethernet, InfiniBand and Fibre Channel.

“Organizations struggle to keep up with the amount of traffic on traditional networks generated from a variety of sources,” said Bob Laliberte, senior analyst, ESG. “A3CUBE’s In-memory Network fabric leverages an innovative approach to transforming HPC, Big Data and data center environments in order to drive greater performance and efficiencies in the network and storage systems. A3CUBE is extending PCIe capabilities in order to deliver a next generation network that it claims will overcome traditional network bottlenecks utilizing a high performance (Nano-second latency) and massively scalable architecture.”

The innovative RONNIEE Express data plane enables exascale storage that combines supercomputing’s massively parallel operational concepts and an innovative I/O interface eliminating central switching, thanks to the support of a multi-dimensional topology like 2D/3D Torus and Hypercubes. This reduces network overhead, slashing the latency of traditional storage networking designs and introduces military grade reliability along with carrier grade data plane features. The RONNIEE Express communication mechanism creates a genuine paradigm shift in network communication that introduces a full application with a transparent memory-to-memory direct connection. The In-Memory Network discards the protocol stack bottleneck and replaces it with a direct memory-to-memory mapped socket, producing extraordinary and disruptive performance enhancements while leveraging commodity hardware.

“Today’s data center architectures were never designed to handle the extreme I/O and data access demands of HPC, Hadoop and other Big Data applications,” said Emilio Billi, founder and CTO of A3CUBE.  “The scalability and performance limitations inherent in current network designs are too severe to be rescued by incremental enhancements. The only way to accommodate the next generation of high performance data applications is with a radical new design that delivers disruptive performance gains to eradicate the network bottlenecks and unlock true application potential.”

A3CUBE’s first three products incorporating the RONNIEE Express product line address different data center requirements in building out an In-Memory Network fabric and include:

• RONNIEE 2S – RONNIEE 2S is a compact PCIe-based intelligent NIC designed to maximize application performance using a unique combination of hardware and software. RONNIEE 2S Eliminates conventional communications bottlenecks and provides multiple channels with <1µ and fast direct remote I/O connections with nanoseconds level latency.
• RONNIE RIO – RONNIEE RIO is the first general purpose NIC supporting Ethernet and memory-to-memory transactions in a 3D torus topology that can plug in any server equipped with a PCIe slot. This powerful data fabric is designed to deliver unmatched performances and presents a scalable interconnection fabric based on a patent pending shared memory architecture that implements the concept of distributed non-transparent bridging to greatly extend PCIe features and benefits over a next generation network architecture.
• RONNIEE 3 – RONNIEE 3 is a revolutionary card that is designed to extend the scalability of RONNIEE 2S and optimized for high performance data environments. The In Memory Network provides full support for memory-to-memory transactions without the usual software overhead to achieve unmatched efficiency and performance compared to ordinary interconnection fabrics available on the market today.