NVIDIA announced NVIDIA Spectrum-X, an accelerated networking platform designed to improve the performance and efficiency of Ethernet-based AI clouds.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X is built on networking innovations powered by the tight coupling of the NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch with the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU, achieving 1.7x better overall AI performance and power efficiency, along with consistent, predictable performance in multi-tenant environments. Spectrum-X is supercharged by NVIDIA acceleration software and software development kits (SDKs), allowing developers to build software-defined, cloud-native AI applications.
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The delivery of end-to-end capabilities reduces run-times of massive transformer-based generative AI models. This allows network engineers, AI data scientists and cloud service providers to improve results and make informed decisions faster.
The world’s top hyperscalers are adopting NVIDIA Spectrum-X, including industry-leading cloud innovators. As a blueprint and testbed for NVIDIA Spectrum-X reference designs, NVIDIA is building Israel-1, a hyperscale generative AI supercomputer to be deployed in its Israeli data center on Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers based on the NVIDIA HGX H100 eight-GPU platform, BlueField-3 DPUs and Spectrum-4 switches.
“Transformative technologies such as generative AI are forcing every enterprise to push the boundaries of data center performance in pursuit of competitive advantage,” said Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA Spectrum-X is a new class of Ethernet networking that removes barriers for next-generation AI workloads that have the potential to transform entire industries.”
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The NVIDIA Spectrum-X networking platform is highly versatile and can be used in various AI applications. It uses fully standards-based Ethernet and is interoperable with Ethernet-based stacks.
The platform starts with Spectrum-4, the world’s first 51Tb/sec Ethernet switch built specifically for AI networks. Advanced RoCE extensions work in concert across the Spectrum-4 switches, BlueField-3 DPUs and NVIDIA LinkX optics to create an end-to-end 400GbE network that is optimized for AI clouds. NVIDIA Spectrum-X enhances multi-tenancy with performance isolation to ensure tenants’ AI workloads perform optimally and consistently. It also offers better AI performance visibility, as it can identify performance bottlenecks and it features completely automated fabric validation.
Acceleration software driving Spectrum-X includes powerful NVIDIA SDKs such as Cumulus Linux, pure SONiC and NetQ — which together enable the networking platform’s extreme performance. It also includes the NVIDIA DOCA software framework, which is at the heart of BlueField DPUs.
NVIDIA Spectrum-X enables unprecedented scale of 256 200Gb/s ports connected by a single switch, or 16,000 ports in a two-tier leaf-spine topology to support the growth and expansion of AI clouds while maintaining high levels of performance and minimizing network latency.
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