Why Should the Storage Community Care about CXL?

The exponential growth in data volume and traffic across the global internet infrastructure is motivating the exploration of new architectures for data centers to achieve the demand for better performance, efficiency and total cost of ownership (TCO). One promising trend is to segregate the functional components of compute, memory, storage, and networking into pools and organize them as needed according to the specific needs of different workloads. This disaggregation and composability will take us beyond the classic architecture of servers as the unit of computing. Backed by a broad consortium of hyperscalers, equipment OEMs, chipmakers and IP vendors, Compute Express Link (CXL) is a new enabling technology for interconnecting computing resources that embraces existing competing technologies such as Gen-Z and OpenCAPI. Currently in Gen 3.0, CXL enables high-speed, low-latency links with memory cache coherency between processors, accelerators, NICs, memory, and storage. In this keynote, Dr. Ki is going to present the opportunities and challenges that exist across hardware and software, with a focus on Samsung's CXL memory technologies such as CXL memory expanders and memory semantic SSDs. In particular, he will share the direction Samsung wants to move forward with the storage community and suggest various collaboration opportunities.