If it were not for the insatiable bandwidth needs of the twenty major hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is safe to say that the innovation necessary to get Ethernet switching and routing up to 200 Gb/sec or 400 Gb/sec might not have been done at the fast pace that the industry as been able to pull off. …
If you want to get a microcosmic view of the epic battle between Ethernet and InfiniBand (which also includes Omni-Path no matter how much Intel protests) as they relate to high performance computing in its many modern guises, there is perhaps no better place to look at what Mellanox Technologies is selling. …
It is hard to remember that for decades, whether a system was large or small, its storage was intricately and inescapably linked to its compute. …
Server processor architectures are trying to break the ties between memory and compute to allow the capacities of each to scale independently of each other, but switching and routing giant Cisco Systems has already done this for a high-end switch chip that looks remarkably like a CPU tuned for network processing. …
The world of Ethernet switching and routing used to be more predictable than just about any other part of the datacenter, but for the past decade the old adage – ten times the bandwidth for three times the cost – has not held. …
While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap. …
It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. …
Ethernet switching has its own kinds of Moore’s Law barriers. The transition from 10 Gb/sec to 100 Gb/sec devices over the past decade has been anything but smooth, and a lot of compromises had to be made to even get to the interim – and unusual – 40 Gb/sec stepping stone towards the 100 Gb/sec devices that are ramping today in the datacenter. …
With the increasing adoption of scale-out architectures and cloud computing, high performance interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. …
Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform