- Nvidia had announced the acquisition of Mellanox in April 2020
- Mellanox’s Spectrum switches already ship with Cumulus Linux and SONiC
Semiconductor player Nvidia has announced plans to acquire California, USA-based Cumulus. The company informed that its approach to creating both the hardware and software for accelerated computing expands deeper into networking software with Cumulus.
“We’re delighted to join forces with Cumulus and look forward to the innovations we’ll deliver to customers together,” read Nvidia’s official statement.
Mellanox’s Spectrum switches already ship with Cumulus Linux
Interestingly, Mellanox’s Spectrum switches are shipped with Cumulus Linux on-board and Nvidia has recently acquired Mellanox. Nvidia had recently informed about the $7 billion Mellanox deal.
“With Mellanox, the new NVIDIA has end-to-end technologies from AI computing to networking, full-stack offerings from processors to software, and significant scale to advance next-generation data centers. Our combined expertise, supported by a rich ecosystem of partners, will meet the challenge of surging global demand for consumer internet services, and the application of AI and accelerated data science from cloud to edge to robotics,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, had said earlier.
From chips and systems to software including analytics
With Cumulus, Nvidia informed that it can innovate and optimise across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ. At the OCP Summit in March 2016, Mellanox had announced a partnership with Cumulus and started shipping combined offerings.
“Nvidia’s approach to creating both the hardware and software for accelerated computing expands deeper into networking software with Cumulus. The ability to innovate across the entire technology stack will help us deliver performance at scale for the accelerated, software-defined data center,” read Nvidia’s official statement.
It continued, “Cumulus, based in Mountain View, Calif., supports more than 100 hardware platforms with Cumulus Linux, its operating system for network switches. Our ultrafast Nvidia Mellanox Spectrum switches already ship with Cumulus Linux and SONiC, the open source offering forged in Microsoft’s Azure cloud and managed by the Open Compute Project.”
