Ultra Ethernet For Scalable AI Network Deployment
Cisco, Tuesday, October 14th, 2025
As data centers scale up, scale out, and scale across to meet the demands of artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads, networks face growing challenges. Increasing network failures, fabric congestion, and uneven load balancing are becoming critical pain points, threatening both performance and reliability.
These issues drive up tail latency and create bottlenecks, undermining the efficiency of large-scale distributed environments.
To tackle these challenges, the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) was formed in 2023, spearheading a new, high-performance Ethernet stack designed for these demanding environments. At its core is a scalable congestion control model optimized for microsecond-level latency and the complex, high-volume traffic of AI and HPC. As a UEC steering member, Cisco plays a pivotal role in shaping the foundational technologies driving next-generation Ethernet.