The founding of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) was announced on 19 July 2023, and RED-SEA coordinator Eviden (an Atos business) is one of the founding members – the only European company. The UEC is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet’s ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.
The UEC is good news for the European interconnect: RED-SEA has been working to add Ethernet compatibility to Eviden’s BXI interconnect, and this work will contribute to the future UEC-compatible version of BXI.
Ultra Ethernet Consortium is founded by companies with long-standing history and experience in high-performance solutions. Each member is contributing significantly to the broader ecosystem of high-performance in an egalitarian manner. The founding members include AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, who collectively have decades of networking, AI, cloud and high-performance computing-at-scale deployments.
“This isn’t about overhauling Ethernet,” said Dr. J Metz, Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. “It’s about tuning Ethernet to improve efficiency for workloads with specific performance requirements. We’re looking at every layer – from the physical all the way through the software layers – to find the best way to improve efficiency and performance at scale.”