Ethernet Is Winning The AI Supercomputing Battle
DCD, Wednesday, February 11th, 2026
HPE's Slingshot shows how 'Ethernet plus' beats proprietary interconnects
Twice a year, the Top500 project ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world. This gauntlet for geeks pushes the boundaries of what a computer can actually do.
It's easy to look at the upper echelons of the lists to see what brand of GPU is powering some of the most intensive computing workloads ever known to man. But there's an often overlooked component that's the real performance powerhouse behind these impressive feats of engineering.
The interconnectivity, which brings the various disparate GPUs together, is the real supercomputing marvel. Able to move workloads from one chip to another at ungodly speeds, all while ensuring the data being transmitted remains intact.