AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides u

[harlan4096]

Enabling zettascale AMD-based AI cluster.
 
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be among the first hyperscalers to deploy AMD's latest Instinct MI350X-series GPUs as well as its Pensando Pollara 400GbE network interface card, which is the industry's first Ultra Ethernet-compliant NIC, AMD disclosed at its Advancing AI event. The announcement comes as the Ultra Ethernet Consortium this week published Specification 1.0 of the Ultra Ethernet technology designed for hyper-scale AI and HPC data centers. 

Systems featuring AMD's Instinct MI350X-series GPUs as well as Pensando Pollara 400GbE NICs will be broadly available at OCI and possibly other cloud service providers in the second half of this year, according to the company. The Pensando Pollara 400GbE network cards will be particularly handy for Oracle, which plans to broadly deploy AMD's latest AI GPUs and build a zettascale AI cluster with up to 131,072 Instinct MI355X to enable its customers to train and inference AI models at a massive scale. 


(Image credit: AMD)

AMD's Pensando Pollara 400GbE NICs — just like other Ultra Ethernet-compliant network hardware — are designed for massive scale-out environments containing up to a million AI processors or GPUs and promise an up to six times performance boost for AI workloads. AMD claims that its Pollara 400GbE card offers a 10% higher RDMA performance compared to Nvidia's CX7 and 20% higher RDMA performance than Broadcom's Thor2 solution. In addition, UEC 1.0 features like efficient load-balancing, selective retransmission, and path-aware congestion control can further improve RDMA performance by 25% compared to traditional RoCEv2. 

Continue Reading...