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Ultra Ethernet's Design Principles and Architectural Innovations

Published: August 12, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.08906v1

By: Torsten Hoefler , Karen Schramm , Eric Spada and more

BigTech Affiliations: Intel Broadcom AMD OpenAI Microsoft

Potential Business Impact:

Makes AI and supercomputers talk much faster.

The recently released Ultra Ethernet (UE) 1.0 specification defines a transformative High-Performance Ethernet standard for future Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. This paper, written by the specification's authors, provides a high-level overview of UE's design, offering crucial motivations and scientific context to understand its innovations. While UE introduces advancements across the entire Ethernet stack, its standout contribution is the novel Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET), a potentially fully hardware-accelerated protocol engineered for reliable, fast, and efficient communication in extreme-scale systems. Unlike InfiniBand, the last major standardization effort in high-performance networking over two decades ago, UE leverages the expansive Ethernet ecosystem and the 1,000x gains in computational efficiency per moved bit to deliver a new era of high-performance networking.

Country of Origin
πŸ‡¨πŸ‡­ πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡Έ Switzerland, United States

Page Count
24 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Networking and Internet Architecture