Meta taps Arista for Ethernet-based AI clusters

“The 7700R4 behaves like a single system, with dedicated deep buffers to ensure system-wide lossless transport across the entire Ethernet-based AI network,” Hull wrote. “DES is topology agnostic, [Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC)] ready, optimized for both training and inference workloads, with a 100% efficient architecture, and offers the rich telemetry and smart features that the modern AI Center needs.”

The UEC was founded last year by AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, and it now includes more than 75 vendors. The consortium is developing technologies aimed at increasing the scale, stability, and reliability of Ethernet networks to satisfy AI’s high-performance networking requirements. UEC specifications will define a variety of scalable Ethernet improvements, including better multi-path and packet delivery options as well as modern congestion and telemetry features.

“Network performance and availability play an important role in extracting the best performance out of our AI training clusters. It’s for that reason that we’ve continued to push for disaggregation in the backend network fabrics for our AI clusters,” according to a Meta blog.