Ethernet Consortium Shoots For 1 Million Node Clusters That Beat Infiniband
The Next Platform, Thursday, July 20,2023
Here we go again. Some big hyperscalers and cloud builders and their ASIC and switch suppliers are unhappy about Ethernet, and rather than wait for the IEEE to address issues, they are taking matters in their own hands to create what will ultimately become an IEEE standard that moves Ethernet forward in a direction and speed of their choosing.
This time around - and this is no surprise to readers of The Next Platform - the target is InfiniBand, the low latency, high bandwidth interconnect that is at this point essentially controlled by NVIDEA thanks to the closing of its $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox Technologies in April 2020.
Supercomputer maker Cray was the first to try to create a variant of Ethernet that could take on InfiniBand in the HPC arena with its 'Rosetta' ASIC that is the foundation of its Slingshot interconnect, which we drilled down into back in August 2019.