At SC25, we saw something neat in the Arista booth. Going through the photos, Arista showed off not just a high-throughput Broadcom Tomahawk switch, but also brought Broadcom Jericho 3 hardware for scale-across networking. Scale across networking is becoming a hot topic as the idea of adding deep buffering to help bridge large AI campuses or even multiple campuses has taken hold.
Arista Shows Scale-Across Network Switches at SC25
At SC25, we saw three switches running in a rack. Immediately, we noticed this Arista 7280R4K-32DE, which was different. This is a 32-port QSFP-DD 800G switch with another eight 25GbE ports. The switch sports encryption on all of the 800G ports and 32GB of packet buffer memory. If that seems like a lot, the reason these scale-across switch chips need so much packet buffer memory is because as the distance and speed scale, there are more packets being transmitted over the wire at any given time.
Arista also showed off another scale-across switch with the Arista 7280R4K-64QC-10PE. This has ten OSFP 800G ports in the center, then on the sides has 64-ports of 100G QSFP ports. Since it has many lower-speed ports, it does not need as much packet buffer. This is a 16GB packet buffer switch.
Below that one, you might see the Arista 7060X6-64PE. This is a 51.2T switch based on the Broadcom Tomahawk family. It is an alternative to the NVIDIA SN5610 Spectrum-X switch that we have shown a few times and will have a piece on soon on STH.
Final Words
It was neat to see these Arista switches in our SC25 photo library. Arista would not normally be a networking brand that you would expect to see in traditional HPC clusters. Now that the large-scale clusters are often AI clusters, Arista has been a brand we are seeing often in our AI cluster tour videos. Arista was also talking about technologies like ZR+ optics, which we did an article and video on earlier this year, as those are also foundational for many scale-across networking deployments. Hopefully, our team can show you more on scale-across networking soon.
We hope those in the US have a happy Thanksgiving.
