Arista announces AI networking agent, Nvidia and Vast partnerships

Arista’s Etherlink technology will be supported across a range of products, including 800G systems and line cards, and will be compatible with specifications from the Ultra Ethernet Consortium.

The need for such a technology package is being driven the explosion of AI datasets, in addition to helping customers solve the challenge of coordinating the complex web of components like GPUs, NICs, switches, optics, and cables in large AI clusters, according to Ullal:

“As the size of large language models (LLMs) increases for AI training, data parallelization becomes inevitable. The number of GPUs needed to train these larger models cannot keep up with the massive parameter count and the dataset size. AI parallelization, be it data, model, or pipeline, is only as effective as the network that interconnects the GPUs. GPUs must exchange and compute global gradients to adjust the model’s weights. To do so, the disparate components of the AI puzzle have to work cohesively as one single AI Center: GPUs, NICs, interconnecting accessories such as optics/cables, storage systems, and most importantly the network in the center of them all.“

The whole system rises together for optimum performance, rather than foundering in isolation as with prior network silos, Ullal stated. “The AI Center shines by eliminating silos to enable coordinated performance tuning, troubleshooting, and operations, with the central network playing a pivotal role to create and power the linked system.”

Arista said it will demonstrate the AI agent technology at the 10^th anniversary of its IPO at the NYSE on June 5th, with customer trials expected in the second half of 2024.

In a related AI development, Arista said it has partnered with Vast Data to help customers build high-performance infrastructure for AI development.