The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) and the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) announced a new collaboration to improve Ethernet performance for next-generation AI clusters and HPC.
UEC plans to develop enhancements to Ethernet, and the OCP has an active Community developing sustainable large-scale computational infrastructure for AI and HPC with Ethernet.
Key aspects of the collaboration will involve aligning work within OCP and UEC, focusing efforts on shared objectives and ensuring OCP's integration of UEC's Ethernet enhancements is smooth and effective. Overall, the alliance will leverage the expertise of both organizations to advance Ethernet performance for AI workloads. Areas that have been identified for initial exploration on potential collaborations include: OCP Switch Abstraction Interface (SAI), OCP Caliptra Workstream, OCP Networking Project, OCP NIC Workstream, OCP Time Appliance Project, and OCP Future Technologies Initiative.
“The uptake for AI to assist humans in the workplace is expected to be widespread, including automating data center operations, and has created a data center IT equipment investment perfect storm. Capex spend forecasts have been adjusted upwards by major analyst firms, driven by the planned deployments of hyperscale data center operators of large-scale AI clusters. By collaborating, the UEC and the OCP Community system specifications can have a greater influence on the development of sustainable, large-scale AI clusters addressing key memory size, and connectivity bandwidth challenges posed by large language models," said George Tchaparian, CEO at the Open Compute Project Foundation.
“AI and HPC workloads present new network challenges such as the need for greater scale, more bandwidth, multi-pathing and faster reaction to congestion. UEC was formed to develop specifications for Ethernet that will bring improvements to better meet the requirements of these workloads as they are experiencing tremendous growth which will change the nature of network traffic, potentially as significant as the switch from voice to video. Collaborating with the OCP Community will fast-track the integration of the UEC-inspired Ethernet enhancements into complete systems that can serve the market”, said J Metz, Steering Committee Chair at the Ultra Ethernet Consortium.
