NVIDIA Unveils Spectrum-X Ethernet Networking for AI with Dell, HPE, and Lenovo Integration

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 20, 2023 — NVIDIA today announced that Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo will be the first to integrate NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking technologies for AI into their server lineups to help enterprise customers speed up generative AI workloads.

Purpose-built for generative AI, Spectrum-X offers enterprises a new class of Ethernet networking that can achieve 1.6x higher networking performance for AI communication versus traditional Ethernet offerings.The new systems coming from three of the top system makers bring together Spectrum-X with NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NVIDIA AI Workbench software to provide enterprises the building blocks to transform their businesses with generative AI.

“Generative AI and accelerated computing are driving a generational transition as enterprises upgrade their data centers to serve these workloads,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Accelerated networking is the catalyst for a new wave of systems from NVIDIA’s leading server manufacturer partners to speed the shift to the era of generative AI.”

“Accelerated computing and networking are key to building systems to meet the demands of large language models and generative AI applications,” said Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies. “Through our collaboration, Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are providing customers with the infrastructure and software needed to quickly and securely extract intelligence from their data.”

“Generative AI will undoubtedly drive innovation across multiple industries,” said Antonio Neri, president and CEO of HPE. “These powerful new applications will require a fundamentally different architecture to support a variety of dynamic workloads. To enable customers to realize the full potential of generative AI, HPE is partnering with NVIDIA to build systems with the required power, efficiency and scalability to support these applications.”

“Generative AI can power unprecedented transformation but places unprecedented demands on enterprise infrastructure,” said Yuanqing Yang, chairman and CEO of Lenovo. “Working closely with NVIDIA, Lenovo is building efficient, accelerated systems with the networking, computing and software needed to power modern AI applications.”

Networking Purpose-Built to Accelerate AI

For peak AI workload efficiency, Spectrum-X combines the extreme performance of the Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch; the NVIDIA BlueField-3 SuperNIC, a new class of network accelerators for supercharging hyperscale AI workloads; as well as acceleration software. Spectrum-X complements BlueField-3 DPUs, the world’s most advanced infrastructure computing platform.

Spectrum-4 is the world’s first 51Tb/sec Ethernet switch for AI, providing highly effective data throughput at scale and under load while minimizing network congestion for multi-tenant, AI cloud workloads. Its intelligent, fine-tuned routing technology enables maximum utilization of network infrastructure at all times.

BlueField-3 SuperNICs are designed for network-intensive, massively parallel computing, offering up to 400Gb/s RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) network connectivity between GPU servers and boosting performance for AI training and inference traffic on the east-west network inside the cluster. They also enable secure, multi-tenant data center environments, ensuring deterministic and isolated performance between tenant jobs. Boasting a power-efficient, half-height, half-length PCIe form factor, BlueField-3 SuperNICs are ideal for enterprise-class servers.

Acceleration software powering Spectrum-X features NVIDIA software development kits such as Cumulus Linux, Pure SONiC and NetQ — which together drive the platform’s breakthrough performance — and the NVIDIA DOCA software framework, which is at the heart of BlueField.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise provides frameworks, pretrained models and development tools for secure, stable and supported production AI. NVIDIA AI Workbench allows developers to quickly create, test and customize pretrained generative AI models on a PC or workstation — then scale them to virtually any data center or cloud.

NVIDIA Israel-1 Supercomputer Powered by Spectrum-X
Spectrum-X also enables the NVIDIA Israel-1 supercomputer, a reference architecture for next-generation AI systems. Israel-1 is a collaboration with Dell Technologies, using Dell PowerEdge XE9680 servers powered by the NVIDIA HGX H100 eight-GPU platform and BlueField-3 DPUs and SuperNICs with Spectrum-4 switches.

Availability

New systems from Dell, HPE and Lenovo featuring the complete NVIDIA AI stack are expected in the first quarter of next year.

About NVIDIA

Since its founding in 1993, NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been a pioneer in accelerated computing. The company’s invention of the GPU in 1999 sparked the growth of the PC gaming market, redefined computer graphics, ignited the era of modern AI and is fueling industrial digitalization across markets. NVIDIA is now a full-stack computing company with data-center-scale offerings that are reshaping industry.

Source: Nvidia