iPronics Partners with Barcelona Supercomputing Center for AI Infrastructure

iPronics, a pioneer in silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching for AI infrastructure, has entered into a strategic two-year collaboration with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) to advance programmable optical networking for next-generation GPU-based AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.

The partnership aims to bring optical hardware and software together as an integrated AI networking architecture. iPronics will provide its programmable optical switching platform, low-level software, and APIs, while BSC will develop software above the switch-management layer. Together, the teams are working on workload-aware networking approaches that align the communication requirements of AI applications with dynamically reconfigurable optical connectivity.

Christian Dupont, CEO of iPronics, stated, "AI infrastructure is reaching a point where scaling compute also requires rethinking the network. Networking needs to become more dynamic and more closely aligned with the behavior of AI workloads. Our strategic collaboration with BSC is an important milestone in bringing programmable optical networking deeper into the AI infrastructure stack."

Antonio J. Peña, a Leading Researcher and Group Leader at BSC-CNS, added, "As AI and HPC systems scale, the interconnect is becoming an increasingly important part of overall system architecture. Our collaboration with iPronics gives us the opportunity to explore how programmable optical networking and the software stack can work together to support more dynamic and efficient computing infrastructures."

iPronics' programmable optical networking platform will be integrated within BSC's research-class GPU and HPC infrastructure, creating an environment for the teams to advance networking approaches across AI training and inference, including Large Language Model (LLMs) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) workloads. The collaboration will generate system-level insights to help inform the architecture of future AI infrastructure.

The partnership builds on iPronics' strong market momentum following its recent $125 million Series B round, co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital, with participation from NVIDIA. This brings the company's total funding to $177 million. iPronics recently opened a U.S. office in Santa Clara, California, to expand its product strategy, customer deployments, and AI infrastructure partnerships.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center, one of the leading supercomputing centers in the world, hosts one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, MareNostrum 5. The center specializes in High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and its role is to provide supercomputing infrastructure and services to Spanish and European scientists, as well as to generate knowledge and technology for transfer to society.