High-Performance and Smart Networking Technologies for HPC and AI

High-Performance Networking technologies are generating a lot of excitement towards building next generation High-End Computing (HEC) systems for HPC and AI with GPGPUs, accelerators, and Data Center Processing Units (DPUs), and a variety of application workloads. This tutorial will provide an overview of these emerging technologies, their architectural features, current market standing, and suitability for designing HEC systems. It will start with a brief overview of IB, HSE, RoCE, and Omni-Path interconnect. An in-depth overview of the architectural features of these interconnects will be presented with associated hands-on exercises. It will be followed with an overview of the emerging NVLink, NVLink2, NVSwitch, EFA, and Slingshot architectures. We will then present advanced features of commodity high-performance networks that enable performance and scalability. We will then provide an overview of enhanced offload capable network adapters like DPUs/IPUs (Smart NICs), their capabilities and features. Next, an overview of software stacks for high-performance networks like Open Fabrics Verbs, LibFabrics, and UCX comparing the performance of these stacks will be given. Next, challenges in designing MPI library for these interconnects, solutions and sample performance numbers will be presented.