Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) Doesn't Want To Kill Infiniband, But It Wants Ethernet To Beat It
The Next Platform, Thursday, November 14th, 2024
Welcome to the second part in our series of chats with J Metz, chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium.
Like many of you, we have watched the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand in the past two and a half decades. We have also watched how technologies - particularly remote direct memory access across devices linked over the network - originally developed for InfiniBand have made the jump to Ethernet.
InfiniBand has proved very difficult to beat in HPC and, for the moment at least, is the preferred low latency, high bandwidth interconnect for back-end networking in AI training clusters that are a similar kind of supercomputer. But with the changes being implemented by members of the UEC, Ethernet is going to be able to scale much further than InfiniBand ever could and will have some properties that are still missing from InfiniBand.