Ultra Ethernet Has Arrived: One Network To Rule Them All?
HPC Wire, Tuesday, September 9th, 2025
When discussing interconnects in the HPC sector, InfiniBand is typically at the top of the list. However, when moving to the enterprise sector, the interconnect of choice is Ethernet.
Enter AI, where systems are becoming increasingly larger in terms of node count. Indeed, scaling to these larger numbers is a challenge for many networks. The massive xAI Colosus system uses Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet. As told by Gilad Shainer, vice president of networking at Nvidia, 'the only Ethernet infrastructure, not InfiniBand, that has managed to reach that scale (100,000 nodes) by running single-job workloads across the entire system.'