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.
