The Linux Foundation | 27 August 2024
New initiative will help realize the communications infrastructure of the future.
TOKYO—KubeDay Japan 2024 —August 27, 2024 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN Global Forum), the international industry association developing photonics-based technologies for a more secure and sustainable world, today announce an expanded partnership to leverage the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Kubernetes software platform into the IOWN Global Forum's composable disaggregated infrastructure over optical interconnected computing.
"CNCF is looking forward to partnering with the IOWN Global Forum community,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO, Cloud Native Computing Foundation. “We see Kubernetes and cloud native technology as integral in enabling advanced use cases to drive a more sustainable, smart connected world. Through collaborations like these, I feel confident that we can successfully address the evolving and complex demands organizations face today.”
“We are pleased to extend our partnership with Linux Foundation and CNCF to help us meet our ambitions to deliver the communications infrastructure of the future,” said Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe, President and Chairperson of the IOWN Global Forum. “It is only through global and open collaborative efforts like this that we can achieve a more sustainable, secure and high-performing network and computing infrastructure to revolutionize our personal lives, workplaces, and society.”
The two organizations have amended the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to include CNCF projects in addition to Open Programmable Infrastructure projects, LF Edge projects and LF Networking projects. Together, the organizations will accelerate the development of integrated optical network architecture described in the IOWN Global Forum’s Vision 2030 Roadmap, with various open-source software in Linux Foundation-hosted projects within the ecosystem. The goal is to deliver comprehensive and accessible next-generation infrastructure for future use cases and business impacts.
The agreement calls on members and experts from both the IOWN Global Forum and Linux Foundation to work towards realizing their shared goals. One of the Forum’s aims is to provide the IOWN Reference Implementation Model to realize each use case of AI integrated Communication, Cyber Physical Systems, Digital Twin Computing, Network Digital Twin, Services Infrastructure for Financial Industry, and more.
The Linux Foundation projects involved in the collaboration include CNCF, LF Networking, LF Edge and Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI). The IOWN Global Forum member companies already reported its recognized Proofs of Concept (PoCs) in cyber physical systems use cases that leveraged Kubernetes/OpenShift container platform supporting GPU composability and DPU (Data Processing Unit)/IPU (Infrastructure Processing Unit) composability in the IOWN data centric infrastructure. It is aggregating sensor image data on light speed remote direct memory access with all-photonics network into GPU memory for remote GPU inference AI service in regional edge to many customer edges. Also, displayed power consumption has been reduced by 40% by IOWN infrastructure monitoring with Kepler open source software, which is a CNCF environmentally sustainable project.
Further cross-collaboration to deliver a sustainable, smart connected world is still needed. The IOWN Global Forum hosted its first public event, FUTURES Vancouver 2024, on the transformative power of photonics on April 25th and invited the Linux Foundation to present there. CNCF also hosted KubeDay Japan 2024 on August 27th, where the IOWN Global Forum’s member companies showcased Kubernetes-based Heterogeneous and Disaggregated Computing for DCI as a Service; demonstrated IOWN data-centric infrastructure which is Composable Disaggregated Infrastructure with Kubernetes dynamic resources allocation; OPI composability of MicroShift-based Intel IPU and accelerators chaining. It also showcased at KubeDay its IOWN PoC report and discussed the smart connected world of the future with participants.
The IOWN Global Forum’s next public event is FUTURES Taipei 2024 on October 9th.
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About the IOWN Global Forum
The IOWN Global Forum was established in 2020 as a private sector organization to develop IOWN technologies and use cases. As of the end of 2023, it is comprised of over 150 organizations. The objective of the IOWN Global Forum is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications, and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, use cases and best practices. For more information, visit IOWN Global Forum – Innovative Optical and Wireless Network.
Media Contacts
Noah Lehman
The Linux Foundation
Joe Hatt
IOWN Global Forum