High Performance Ethernet for Zettascale
The zettascale and broader high performance computing market continues to evolve, supporting a diverse range of science platforms with more cloud-like characteristics. At the same time, there is increasingly a drive for cross-industry, standards-based high performance networking solutions that provide broad interoperability with enterprise computing technologies across a multi-vendor supply chain.
Ethernet is ubiquitous in the enterprise space but is only now showing promise in terms of its latency performance in an high-performance computing environment.
Aims
- The Zettascale Lab will investigate multi-vendor, low-latency Ethernet for high performance computing solutions. We will benchmark a diversity of high performance computing applications at a range of scales, comparing performance against the typical low-latency fabrics deployed today. This work will show where Ethernet sits in the high performance computing ecosystem. It will inform future research into which performance characteristics need to be developed for different types of applications.
- The Zettascale Lab will also investigate software-defined Ethernet technologies for high performance computing, leveraging solutions such as P4®, a data-plane programming language which will potentially allow the network to be tuned to the precise needs of the application.
- Finally, the Zettascale Lab will stimulate cross-industry focus on open standards for high performance Ethernet, driving momentum in this field.
