The Network Is Indeed Trying To Become The Computer
The Register, Friday, June 27th, 2025
Masked networking costs are coming to AI systems
Moore's Law has run out of gas and AI workloads need massive amounts of parallel compute and high bandwidth memory right next to it - both of which have become terribly expensive. If it weren't for this situation, the beancounters of the world might be complaining about the cost of networking in the datacenter.
But luckily - we suppose - with these modern systems, some of the costs of networking are masked as compute. Think of the scale-up networks such as the NVLink ports and NVLink Switch fabrics that are part and parcel of an GPU accelerated server node - or, these days, a rackscale system like the DGX NVL72 and its OEM and ODM clones.