iPronics, BSC advance optical networking for AI
Author: Joe Peck
iPronics, a developer of silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching, has announced a two-year technology collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) to advance programmable optical networking for GPU-based AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.
The collaboration will bring iPronics’s programmable optical switching platform together with BSC’s research-class GPU and HPC infrastructure. The teams will investigate how dynamically reconfigurable optical connectivity can respond to the communication requirements of AI workloads.
iPronics will provide its programmable optical switching platform, low-level software, and APIs, whilst BSC will develop software above the switch-management layer. The work will focus on networking approaches that align optical connectivity with AI applications.
“AI infrastructure is reaching a point where scaling compute also requires rethinking the network,” says Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics. “Networking needs to become more dynamic and more closely aligned with the behaviour of AI workloads.
“Our strategic collaboration with BSC is an important milestone in bringing programmable optical networking deeper into the AI infrastructure stack.”
Programmable optics for AI workloads
The platform will be integrated into BSC’s GPU and HPC infrastructure, allowing the teams to investigate networking approaches for AI training and inference, including large language models (LLMs) and mixture-of-experts (MoE) workloads.
Antonio Peña, Leading Researcher and Group Leader at BSC, notes, “As AI and HPC systems scale, the interconnect is becoming an increasingly important part of overall system architecture.
“Our collaboration with iPronics gives us the opportunity to explore how programmable optical networking and the software stack can work together to support more dynamic and efficient computing infrastructures.”
The collaboration is intended to generate system-level insights that can inform the architecture of future AI infrastructure.
The announcement follows iPronics’s recent $125 million (£93 million) Series B funding round, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from NVIDIA. The funding brings the company’s total raised to $177 million (£132 million).
iPronics has also opened a US office in Santa Clara, California, which it says will support its product strategy, customer deployments, and AI infrastructure partnerships.
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