WAYNE, PA — Cornelis and NEC Corporation are expanding their infrastructure partnership into Japan and the broader Asia-Pacific region after NEC validated Cornelis’ CN5000 networking technology, giving the Wayne-based company a larger channel for its high-performance computing products as AI systems place heavier demands on data-center networks.
The companies plan to target enterprise, manufacturing, academic and research customers deploying artificial intelligence and high-performance computing infrastructure, according to the companies. The agreement builds on their existing work together in Europe.
NEC evaluated Cornelis’ CN5000 Omni-Path platform for high-performance computing workloads before broadening the relationship. The testing included Message Passing Interface, or MPI, communications across multiple workloads and communication patterns.
The companies stated that the evaluation validated the CN5000’s capabilities and identified optimization techniques intended to improve application performance in large-scale computing environments.
The expanded relationship gives Cornelis access to NEC’s customer relationships in Japan as competition intensifies to supply networking technology capable of moving data among the processors used for AI training, inference and other compute-intensive workloads.
“AI infrastructure is placing unprecedented demands on network performance, scalability, and efficiency,” Cornelis Chief Executive Officer Lisa Spelman said.
Spelman said the NEC relationship is intended to give customers additional networking options as Cornelis takes its technology into new markets.
NEC also plans to participate in early evaluations of Cornelis’ next-generation CN6000 platform. The companies intend to test the technology as customers prepare for larger AI training, inference and HPC deployments.
“Organizations across Japan are preparing for increasingly complex AI and HPC environments that require higher performance, scalability, and efficiency,” Takeshi Hirose, senior director of NEC Corporation’s Compute Department, said.
Hirose said the collaboration expands the high-performance networking technologies available to NEC customers while allowing the company to evaluate capabilities for future computing requirements.
The partnership extends Cornelis’ strategy of distributing its networking technology through server and infrastructure providers rather than limiting deployments to direct customer relationships.
Cornelis and NEC plan to continue jointly evaluating networking technologies and optimizing deployments as AI and HPC infrastructure scales in Japan and other Asia-Pacific markets.
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