{"id":6845,"date":"2023-12-09T04:00:58","date_gmt":"2023-12-09T04:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fibermall.com\/blog\/?p=6845"},"modified":"2023-12-19T06:46:47","modified_gmt":"2023-12-19T06:46:47","slug":"ethernet-or-ethernot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fibermall.com\/blog\/ethernet-or-ethernot.htm","title":{"rendered":"EtherNET or EtherNOT?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A survey of the AI network positions of the leading vendors In July 2023, the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), initiated by the Linux Foundation and its Joint Development Foundation, was officially launched, dropping a depth charge into the turbulent AI network interconnection ecosystem. In August 2023, at the IEEE Hot Interconnects (HOTI) international forum, which focuses on advanced hardware and software architectures and various interconnect network implementations, representatives from Intel, Nvidia, AMD, and other companies participated in a panel discussion on the question of \u201cEtherNET or EtherNOT\u201d, and expressed their views on Ethernet. The emerging AI\/ML workloads are driving the demand for high-performance network interconnection. About ten years ago, RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) introduced low-latency data transmission into the Ethernet architecture, but compared with other network technologies, Ethernet seemed to lag in technology development. Is the battle between EtherNET and EtherNOT coming again? In the Ethernet era, cloud vendors, equipment vendors, and other parties have their interests, and it is a critical decision-making period. How will they choose?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This topic of \u201cEtherNET or EtherNOT\u201d was already discussed at the HOTI conference in 2005, and the conclusion at that time was as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"EtherNET<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the\u00a0discussion of\u00a0the 2023 HOTI conference, Brad Burres, senior researcher and chief hardware architect for the Network and Edge Group at Intel, and Frank Helms, data center GPU system architect at AMD, favored Ethernet. Brad Burres argued that no matter what technology is adopted, an open ecosystem is needed to reduce the cost of the entire industry and achieve the required software infrastructure. As the protocol matures, Ethernet will be the winner unless another open standard structure emerges immediately (such as CXL). Frank Helms listed the first, second, and fifth places in the global supercomputer TOP500 list, Frontier, Aurora, and LUMI, respectively, which are all based on the Ethernet-based HPE Cray Slingshot-11 network structure for connection. He believed that Ethernet is at the forefront of interconnect technology. The emergence of UEC (Ultra Ethernet Alliance) also reflects that there is a lot of suppressed demand for Ethernet for large-scale AI training cluster interconnection. Larry Dennison, director of network research at NVIDIA, believed that there is still a gap between Ethernet and meeting the needs of AI workloads. If Ethernet meets all these needs, is it still Ethernet? How long can it be achieved? The Ethernet market is indeed huge, it will not disappear, but in the next few years, the development speed of Ethernet will not be able to meet the needs of this market. Torsten Hoefler, professor at ETH Zurich and consultant for Microsoft in the field of large-scale artificial intelligence and network, pointed out that Ethernet is the present and future of data centers and supercomputers, but not the Ethernet we are talking about now, Ethernet needs to evolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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