Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, and Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced a broad collaboration on software technologies for next-generation memory solutions. The partnership will focus on the development and validation of open source software for existing and emerging memory and storage products, including NVMe SSDs; CXL memory; computational memory/storage (HBM-PIM, Smart SSDs) and fabrics — in building an expansive ecosystem for closely integrated memory hardware and software.

The exponential growth of data driven by AI, AR and the fast-approaching metaverse is bringing disruptive changes to memory designs, requiring more sophisticated software technologies that better link with the latest hardware advancements.

“Samsung and Red Hat will make a concerted effort to define and standardize memory software solutions that embrace evolving server and memory hardware, while building a more robust memory ecosystem,” said Yongcheol Bae, Executive Vice President and Head of the Memory Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics. “We will invite partners from across the IT industry to join us in expanding the software-hardware memory ecosystem to create greater customer value.”

“In the upcoming data-centric era, the integration of memory-centric hardware and software architectures will become increasingly essential, and for this purpose, Red Hat is happy to participate in the joint undertaking with Samsung,” added Marjet Andriesse, Senior Vice President and Head of Red Hat Asia Pacific.

The new partnership marks the first time that Samsung has joined forces with an open source software company to foster engagements across the IT marketplace. As an extension to this strategic collaboration, Samsung will launch the Samsung Memory Research Cloud (SMRC), where the two companies will develop and verify software solutions on diverse server environments.

Serving as an open collaboration hub, the SMRC will enable customers and partners to evaluate new software products in configuring optimal combinations with memory hardware.

The companies will also participate in open source communities such as the Linux Foundation, to ensure that their software technology has full support in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and with other open source software stacks.

Samsung plans to open its SMRC platform in the second half of this year and expects it to act as an ongoing catalyst for innovation in future IT systems.