Many computing technologies have come and gone but Ethernet endures. Or at least something called Ethernet...
When he took to the stage in Cupertino, California, at the influential Hot Interconnects conference last summer, Amin Vahdat, Google’s chief technologist for AI and infrastructure, said networks have to change to support the hunger for computing that his company’s applications need. “We have to unlearn a lot,” he claimed.
Today, Ethernet serves a vast range of requirements. “The same host network stack was used to service [wide-area network] communication at very low data rates to AI communication at the highest levels of bandwidth, the lowest levels of latency, the lowest levels of jitter,” said Vahdat.
Yet the new network envisaged by Vahdat and others working on large-scale AI will have pretty much the same name as what it replaces. It is an unusual feat of survival for a protocol that turns 50 this summer. But that is because it has benefited from a chameleon-like ability to...