CXL in the Supercomputing Landscape

CXL is a dynamic multi-protocol technology designed to support accelerators and memory devices. CXL provides opportunities to innovate around caching protocol semantics (CXL.cache) and memory access protocols (CXL.mem), all while leveraging the widely used PCIe standard for physical interfaces and device configuration. The CXL standard has grown quickly since its initial announcement in 2019, going from a basic direct-connected device standard in version 1.1 to enabling memory-semantic fabrics for flexible disaggregation in the most recent 3.0 specification. The wide adoption of CXL in the industry is providing new opportunities for system architects to provision memory-semantic resources in flexible ways to better meet the needs of their workloads.