Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully built a Compute Express Link (CXL) infrastructure certified by Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions.

Elements that configure servers, from CXL-related products to software, can now be directly verified at the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) located in Hwaseong, South Korea. Once CXL products are verified by Samsung, they can immediately be requested for product registration to Red Hat, enabling faster product development.

Marking its first achievement through the infrastructure, Samsung has successfully verified its CMM-D product for the first time in the industry this month. The company can also provide tailored solutions to customers by optimizing products at earlier development stages.

“We’re very pleased that our partnership with Red Hat is able to deliver CXL memory products with enhanced reliability to our customers,” said Taeksang Song, Vice President and Head of the New DRAM Solution Development Team at Samsung Electronics. “Through our continued collaboration spanning software and hardware, we will remain at the forefront of developing innovative memory solutions as well as the CXL ecosystem.”

Kyeong Sang Kim, Red Hat Korea GM said, “The optimization of Samsung’s hardware for Red Hat’s software underscores the value of open source technology as an imperative when it comes to expanding next-generation memory solutions such as CMM-D. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with Samsung to further extend CXL solutions to the market.”

Following the successful CXL memory verification by Red Hat for the first time in the industry last December, Samsung has also been certified for datacenter SSD products. Customers using Red Hat-certified products can build high-performance systems by receiving world-class Linux support, complementing the stable hardware operation of Samsung.

Samsung and Red Hat have also been working closely together in various areas, including product certification for both hardware and software, enriching the next-generation CXL ecosystem.

At the Red Hat Summit held in Denver, Colorado, in May, Samsung demonstrated its CMM-D¹ embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3, which enhances the performance of Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRM).

The demo utilized the Scalable Memory Development Kit’s (SMDK) Memory Interleaving software technology, highlighting improved memory access performance. SMDK-equipped CMM-D allows customers to build high-performance AI models, without having to make significant investments, by accelerating the data processing, AI learning and inferencing speeds.

Through their strong partnership, Samsung and Red Hat aim to provide customer solutions suitable for a wide range of user systems while introducing new technology standards to an array of partners and customers and expanding the CXL memory ecosystem.

¹ CMM-D is Samsung’s CXL Memory Module DRAM, a DRAM solution based on the PCIe interface that supports the CXL protocol.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that for the first time in the industry, it has successfully verified Compute Express Link (CXL) memory operations in a real user environment with open-source software provider Red Hat, leading the expansion of its CXL ecosystem.

Due to the exponential growth of data throughput and memory requirements for emerging fields like generative AI, autonomous driving and in-memory databases (IMDBs), the demand for systems with greater memory bandwidth and capacity is also increasing. CXL is a unified interface standard that connects various processors, such as CPUs, GPUs and memory devices through a PCIe® interface that can serve as a solution for limitations in existing systems in terms of speed, latency and expandability.

“Samsung has been working closely with a wide range of industry partners in areas from software, data centers and servers to chipset providers, and has been at the forefront of building up the CXL memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President of Memory Product Planning at Samsung Electronics. “Our CXL partnership with Red Hat is an exemplary case of collaboration between advanced software and hardware, which will enrich and accelerate the CXL ecosystem as a whole.”

In this latest development, Samsung has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 9.3 and verified memory recognition, read and write operations in Red Hat’s KVM and Podman environments. This allows data center clients to easily use Samsung’s CXL memory without having to make additional adjustments to their existing hardware.

“The successful verification of Samsung’s CXL Memory Expander interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is significant because it opens up the applicability of the CXL Memory Expander to IaaS¹ and PaaS²-based software provided by Red Hat,” said Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific. “This is an important milestone in the integration of hardware and software to build an open-source ecosystem for next-generation memory development.”

Samsung and Red Hat are currently working together on a “RHEL 9.3 CXL Memory Enabling Guide” to help users utilize Samsung’s CXL memory on RHEL 9.3 and build high-performance computing systems in various user environments.

The two companies first signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in May 2022 to collaborate on next-generation memory and will continue their efforts through the Samsung Memory Research Center (SMRC) in developing CXL open-source and reference models. The ongoing partnership covers a range of storage and memory products, including NVMe SSDs, CXL Memory, computational memory/storage and fabrics.

¹ Infrastructure as a Service.
² Platform as a Service.