The networking industry loves inflection points. Over the years, we have had many new compute models that require the network to evolve. For as long as I can remember, the holy war between InfiniBand and Ethernet was fought on a relatively simple battlefield: throughput versus ubiquity. But as artificial intelligence workloads scale from tens of thousands of processors to massive clusters approaching the million-graphics-processing-unit mark, the network is fundamentally changing. It is no longer just a standalone infrastructure layer; it has become the critical backplane of a tightly integrated AI supersystem.

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The AI supersystem shift: Why Arista’s 1.6T announcement is an Ethernet inflection point

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, it might be time to stop trying to get servers to do something they’re not designed to do. Servers are effective at many things but were never designed for the rigors of software-defined networking, storage and security.

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Stop using servers to do things they’re not good at: How DPUs can change the data game