New Compact and Standalone Gen-Z Micro Development Kit for Testing and Developing with Gen-Z Ecosystem

SMART Modular Technologies has released an all-in-one compact Gen-Z Micro Development Kit (μDK) for the development and testing of Gen-Z in-band management and fabric manager software from any PC workstation. Gen-Z µDK is a compact standalone hardware platform designed to enable early adopters of the Gen-Z protocol to design beyond the boundaries of a software-defined or hardware-assisted acceleration framework. This further enables designers to explore the full capabilities of the Gen-Z protocol for Memory-Driven Computing (MDC) applications.

The small form-factor software development kit is optimized for cost, size, and flexibility of fabrics, and allows for Linux subsystem development and testing. Gen-Z µDK is a complete system that allows developers to run and test load-store memory accesses to a device across the Gen-Z fabric. It includes both hardware and software components for the Gen-Z Host and Gen-Z Device and will run end-to-end memory load-store accesses on a Gen-Z fabric out of the box. SMART Modular is offering a limited number of the specialized Gen-Z µDK.

Technical Specifications of Gen-Z Micro Development Kit

• Gen-Z Host supports four (4) high-speed lanes.
• Combination of Gen-Z devices (ZMM) can provide 768GB DDR4 memory.
• Stable Linux kernel with Gen-Z sub-system framework supports bridge driver and device tree (.dts) files.
• Accessory cables, power supply, and debug boards are provided for application bring-up.
• The development kit comes in a small chassis with cooling fans that can easily fit on a lab bench or workstation.

Applications of Gen-Z Micro Development Kit

• The kit enables the extension of Gen-Z software eco-systems, such as a Linux framework and drivers.
• The kit is built using FPGA components that allow in-field upgrades of firmware and hardware as new features are released, and to add custom features and offload functions for differentiation and prototyping.
• It offers the development of Gen-Z cable hosts with advanced protocol features like collectives, atomics, and buffer operations.
• It can be used for reference design for use case demo purposes.
• It validates and tests memory access load/store latencies over Gen-Z fabric.
• It allows developers to explore Gen-Z capabilities directly from their lab desk thereby saving time and cost as it integrates components like boards, chassis, modules, power supplies, and fans.

Note: More technical information can be found in the data brief linked at the bottom of this page.