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Posts Tagged 'network switches'

June 11, 2024

How AI Will Drive Cloud Switch Innovation

This article is part five in a series on talks delivered at Accelerated Infrastructure for the AI Era, a one-day symposium held by Marvell in April 2024.

AI has fundamentally changed the network switching landscape. AI requirements are driving foundational shifts in the industry roadmap, expanding the use cases for cloud switching semiconductors and creating opportunities to redefine the terrain.

Here’s how AI will drive cloud switching innovation.

A changing network requires a change in scale

In a modern cloud data center, the compute servers are connected to themselves and the internet through a network of high-bandwidth switches. The approach is like that of the internet itself, allowing operators to build a network of any size while mixing and matching products from various vendors to create a network architecture specific to their needs.

Such a high-bandwidth switching network is critical for AI applications, and a higher-performing network can lead to a more profitable deployment.

However, expanding and extending the general-purpose cloud network to AI isn’t quite as simple as just adding more building blocks. In the world of general-purpose computing, a single workload or more can fit on a single server CPU. In contrast, AI’s large datasets don’t fit on a single processor, whether it’s a CPU, GPU or other accelerated compute device (XPU), making it necessary to distribute the workload across multiple processors. These accelerated processors must function as a single computing element.

AI requires accelerated infrastructure to split workloads across many processors.

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February 14, 2023

The Three Things Next-Generation Data Centers Need from Networking

By Amit Sanyal, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Marvell

Data centers are arguably the most important buildings in the world. Virtually everything we do—from ordinary business transactions to keeping in touch with relatives and friends—is accomplished, or at least assisted, by racks of equipment in large, low-slung facilities.

And whether they know it or not, your family and friends are causing data center operators to spend more money. But it’s for a good cause: it allows your family and friends (and you) to continue their voracious consumption, purchasing and sharing of every kind of content—via the cloud.

Of course, it’s not only the personal habits of your family and friends that are causing operators to spend. The enterprise is equally responsible. They’re collecting data like never before, storing it in data lakes and applying analytics and machine learning tools—both to improve user experience, via recommendations, for example, and to process and analyze that data for economic gain. This is on top of the relentless, expanding adoption of cloud services.

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