| | | Building a new generation of intelligent networks - Interview with Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing, Mellanox
Mellanox will introduce 200Gb / s InfiniBand and Ethernet switches next year, which is the industry's first high-speed network equipment, said Gilad Shainer, vice president of global marketing at Mellanox, in an interview.
Author: Zou Dabin Source: ZD to the top network channel network [original] January 11, 2017
ZD ZDNet network channel January 11 comprehensive news: "higher bandwidth, higher performance," has always been the relentless pursuit of the networking field. Today, with the cloud computing, data, mobile and other new generation of IT technology applications has brought a huge amount of data growth, and user attention to the experience, this goal is more urgent and realistic. For example, NVIDIA's latest depth of learning one machine on the network bandwidth and performance requirements have reached a new height, there are four 100G standard card.
In fact, the network has been in the field of innovation, and strive to improve the performance of network products and bandwidth, "uninstall" (that is, the traditional part of the work by the CPU to transfer to network equipment) is one of the technologies. Mellanox is the main advocate and practitioner of this technology, is based on this innovative technology, Mellanox has introduced a new generation of higher performance network products. Mellanox vice president of global marketing Gilad Shainer said in an interview next year, Mellanox will launch 200Gb / s InfiniBand and Ethernet switches, which is the industry's first launch of such a high-speed network equipment. This will undoubtedly once again promote the upgrading of network transmission capacity.
Gilad Shainer, Vice President, Global Marketing, Mellanox
Accelerate network interconnection
Mellanox is mentioned in the field of HPC almost no one does not know. Mellanox, known at HPC, has been a market leader in the InfiniBand market since its introduction in 2001 of InfiniBand products. In the latest issue of the Global 500 Top 500 list, 39% (194 systems) of the top 500 HPCs used Mellanox's InfiniBand products. If you really use the equipment used to calculate the super, accounting will be higher, reaching 65%.
"In the HPC market InfiniBand has the absolute advantage in the top-ranking of these systems, such as petaflop systems, we occupy nearly half of the market share, which fully Mellanox in high-performance computing systems inside the strength. "Gilad Shainer said.
Gilad Shainer said it is possible to pick the top 2018 TOP500 first US "Coral Coral" system will also use Mellanox InfiniBand.
Of course, InfiniBand is not the only area in which Mellanox is a force. In addition to InfiniBand, in the field of Ethernet, Mellanox equally impressive, especially in high-performance computing. For example, in the global HPC TOP500 list, all 4 Gigabit Ethernet systems are used Mellanox products. At the same time, the world's first 100G Ethernet system is also used Mellanox network products.
It is worth mentioning that the above mentioned 4-Gigabit Ethernet and 100G Ethernet systems are from China, on the one hand that Mellanox HPC in the field of technical strength, but also that China's leading position in the field of HPC.
In addition to HPC, Mellanox extends its technological advantages to other areas, including high-speed storage, databases, and artificial intelligence, says Gilad Shainer, director of marketing at HP. Among them, artificial intelligence has also been Mellanox locked for future focus areas.
"Mellanox is also capable of rapidly extending to the Internet of Things, Autopilot, Medical, Manufacturing, and Retail through Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence," says Mellanox. "In this area, a lot of data needs to be analyzed and read, very much like high performance computing. And many other industries, "he said.
From the "CPU-centric" to "data-centric"
Mellanox's achievements in high-speed networking have benefited from its unique technology philosophy and its unique advantages based on these concepts, "data-centric networks" is one of them, and "uninstall" is to implement this concept The technology used.
In Mellanox's view, the traditional data center computing model is CPU-centric, that all the data must be moved to the CPU before they can be calculated. This mode works well when small amounts of data are available, but can become problematic as the amount of data increases. For example, many areas are now used in distributed computing, which have to wait until the CPU data to be calculated later, if you want to move too much data will make the performance of the entire application bottleneck - because the CPU to wait for the data in order to Complete the calculation, sometimes there will be waiting for each other.
Mellanox believes that the future of the data center should be data-centric, that is, where the data, where the calculation should occur, so as to avoid CPU bottlenecks. In order to practice this idea, Mellanox managed to get the network involved in the computing process, by taking some of the computations out of the network device, which is no longer just a transmitter of data. That is what Mellanox calls an "offload" .
If the data in the CPU, we are in the CPU analysis; if the data in the transmission, we should have the ability to transfer data in the path of the data analysis, "In order to analyze the data efficiently, we need to move computing power to the data, rather than moving the data to the calculation," Gilad Shainer said.
According to Gilad Shainer, in "data-centric" data centers, data moves through the network while doing operations such as addition and subtraction of data and simple analysis of data. In this way, when the data through the network transmission to reach the CPU, has been cleaned, the data processing. This has many advantages: First, it will enhance the performance of the system, because the data will not wait until the CPU after the analysis; Second, it will reduce the data transmission delay, the communication delay from the current 20-30 micro Sec down to 3-4 microseconds.
Intelligent network hardware
Obviously, a new generation of data-centric data center, because the network equipment can share some of the CPU pressure, but also can reduce the network transmission pressure, is a good evolutionary direction, but no doubt the network equipment made better Requirements, that is, network devices need to be more intelligent. With Mellanox's statement, it is necessary to have "Offloading" the network hardware to complete this important transformation of the data center.
"In fact, Mellanox has been working to develop intelligent networks that allow networks to collaborate on data, such as our newest product, HDR InfiniBand 200Gb / s networking products, including the world's first 200Gb / s switch and the world's first 200Gb / s NIC ConnectX-6, are based on this concept introduced a new generation of intelligent networking products. "Gilad Shainer said.
The Quantum chip in the HDR InfiniBand switch has a very powerful and intelligent processing capability to support computing within the network, and Mellanox calls the technology SHARP 2.0.
"With this technology, we can perform data analysis and data query in our switches, as well as support for converged communications, including new Tag Matching, which is critical to overall application performance, whether traditional Performance computing, or the new depth of learning, artificial intelligence software can be applied. "Gilad Shainer said.
Gilad Shainer stressed that, in addition to traditional high-performance computing and deep learning can be used to uninstall, network equipment can complete many other functions of the uninstall, including storage, security, and some network protocol offload, thereby enhancing the overall system performance.
Mellanox acquired Israeli chip company EZchip Semiconductor Corp. in 2015 for approximately $ 800 million in cash, and in 2016 introduced a name for the company that will implement a "data-centric" network to better offload some of its CPU functions. For the BlueField SoC chip.
According to reports, BlueField integrated ARM CPU and PCIe 4.0 built-in exchange, is a switch, network and CPU SoC system. According to Mellanox, SoC can build a lot of dedicated systems, such as storage machines, depth learning all-in-one machine, security all-in-one machine and NFV one machine.
"Compared to traditional solutions, this approach provides better scalability and lower cost, which is a new exploration in the network area, including how to integrate the network plus the ability to calculate, how to better To process the data, "Gilad Shainer said.
"This is Mellanox, on the one hand we have a very stable, with the industry's highest performance and continuous improvement InfiniBand products, and we are constantly exploring is committed to providing higher performance, more efficient, higher Scalability, smarter new generation networking products, "concludes Gilad Shainer.
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