Graphcore has joined the Ultra Ethernet Consortium, an industry-wide body working to update the popular networking technology to meet the growing demands of Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Computing in the data centre.
The consortium is backed by the leading players in networking, data center and cloud computing, including Cisco, Oracle, Arista, Microsoft, Broadcom and Intel.
As a contributing member, Graphcore will help shape the technical and strategic direction of next-generation Ethernet, ensuring that our products remain at the forefront of technological advances.
The UEC’s commitment to open standards also reflects Graphcore’s efforts to promote an open and collaborative ecosystem for AI networking development.
Connecting the future
The Ultra Ethernet Consortium was formed in 2023 in response to the rapidly evolving needs of AI and HPC.
AI has a number of characteristics that are particularly demanding of networking systems such as the challenge of ‘tail latency’ where computational throughput is limited by the time taken to deliver the last message in the communication phase.
The Consortium has identified a range of opportunities to enhance and extend existing Ethernet hardware and networking protocols in response to such challenges.
In its technical white paper, the UEC addresses several aspects of Ethernet technology that – while having served the industry well to this point – are in need of improvement.
Among these is RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), which allows a processor or accelerator anywhere in the network to access data directly from memory anywhere else in the network.
The Coalition aims to address a number of deficiencies in RoCe v2 such as its handling of packet loss. Current solutions for this require costly, specialist fine-tuning of the network. UEC has stated that it would like to see better out-of-the-box operation as standard – citing TCP/IP as a protocol that has been highly successful in this respect.
Engineering careers at Graphcore
Graphcore's membership of the Ultra Ethernet Coalition comes as the company embarks on a major engineering recruitment drive.
We recently joined SoftBank group, bringing large and ongoing investment from one of the world’s leading backers of innovative AI companies.
Now, we are looking to add a significant number of engineers, of all experience levels, across:
- Cloud Development and Operations
- Silicon design
- Software engineering
- Hardware engineering design
- Manufacturing operations
If you believe you have relevant experience and would like to find out more about working at Graphcore, please apply here.
