Cisco and Nvidia have expanded their collaboration to support enterprise AI implementations by tying together Cisco’s Silicon One technology and Nvidia’s Ethernet networking platform. The extended agreement offers customers yet another way to support AI workloads across the data center and strengthens both companies’ strategies to expand the role of Ethernet networking for AI in the enterprise.
“To date, most of the industry dialog on AI has been focused on chips, computing power, and Large Language Models. As enterprises begin to take on AI workloads, though, the challenge of connecting computing resources and data together — both inside of and in between data centers and clouds — is going to be the next frontier of AI innovation. In this sense, the network is going to be the key to successfully scaling out AI in the enterprise,” wrote Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and chief product officer, in a blog about the partnership.
To enable that strategy, the vendors will couple Cisco’s Silicon One technology with Nvidia SuperNICs to become part of the Nvidia Spectrum-X Ethernet networking platform, Patel stated.
Cisco Silicon One processors are purpose-built to support high network bandwidth and performance and can be customized for routing or switching from a single chipset, eliminating the need for different silicon architectures for each network function. Core to the Silicon One system is its support for enhanced Ethernet features, such as improved flow control, congestion awareness, and avoidance. (Cisco recently unwrapped a new family of data center switches based on the Silicon One chip that includes built-in programmable data processing units (DPU) from AMD to offload complex data processing work and free up the switches for AI and large workload processing.)
SuperNICs are the Nvidia’s new class of network accelerators designed to supercharge hyperscale AI workloads in Ethernet-based clouds. SuperNICs feature high-speed network connectivity for GPU-to-GPU communication, achieving speeds reaching 400Gb/s using remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged Ethernet (RoCE) technology, according to Nvidia. Nvidia Spectrum-X is Nvidia’s overarching Ethernet networking platform aimed at accelerating AI workloads.
“Cisco will be building systems that combine Nvidia Spectrum silicon with Cisco OS software, allowing customers to simultaneously standardize on both Cisco networking and Nvidia technology in the data center,” Patel wrote. “By enabling customers to leverage Nvidia Spectrum Silicon that’s specialized for back-end connectivity or Cisco Silicon One, both under a common Nexus software stack (NX-OS and Nexus Dashboard), we will enable an exciting new level of interoperability in the industry.”
In addition, Cisco and Nvidia will invest in cross-portfolio technology to tackle common challenges like congestion management and load balancing, ensuring that enterprises can accelerate their AI deployments, Patel stated.
The vendors said they would also collaborate to create and validate Nvidia Cloud Partner (NCP) and Enterprise Reference Architectures based on Nvidia Spectrum-X with Cisco Silicon One, Hyperfabric, Nexus, UCS Compute, Optics, and other Cisco technologies.
History of Cisco, Nvidia collaborations
The announcement is just the latest expansion of the Cisco/Nvidia partnership. The companies have already worked together to make Nvidia’s Tensor Core GPUs available in Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) rack and blade servers, including Cisco UCS X-Series and UCS X-Series Direct, to support AI and data-intensive workloads in the data center and at the edge. The integrated package includes Nvidia AI Enterprise software, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI.
Earlier this month, Cisco said it has shipped the UCS C845A M8 Rack Server for enterprise data center environments. The 8U rack server is built on Nvidia’s HGX platform and designed to deliver the accelerated compute capabilities needed for AI workloads such as LLM training, model fine-tuning, large model inferencing, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
The companies are also collaborating on AI Pods, which are preconfigured, validated, and optimized infrastructure packages that customers can plug into their data center or edge environments as needed.
The Pods are based on Cisco Validated Design principals, which provide a blueprint for building reliable, scalable, and secure network infrastructures, according to Cisco. The Pods include Nvidia AI Enterprise, which features pretrained models and development tools for production-ready AI, and are managed through Cisco Intersight.
Cisco also offers a turnkey AI package called the Cisco Nexus HyperFabric AI cluster, which will let customers deploy an integrated package of networking in the form of a Cisco 6000 series switch for spine and leaf implementation supporting 400G and 800G Ethernet fabrics, Nvidia GPUs featuring its BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU) and SuperNIC, AI pod-building reference designs, and the Vast Data Platform for unified storage, database and a data-driven function engine built for AI workloads.
Source:: Network World