NVIDIA Spectrum-4 - End-to-End 400Gb/s Networking

At GTC, NVIDIA announced the next evolution of Spectrum networking technology, the NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet platform, which delivers end-to-end 400 Gigibit per second (Gb/s) speeds.

Spectrum-4 is a suite of integration solutions across the networking stack to enable end-to-end 400Gb/s networking and robust security. Spectrum-4 addresses the growing performance gap in artificial intelligence data centre infrastructure, where AI processors have increased processing speed, and require larger and larger network pipes to keep the GPUs running at full speed.

The components of the Spectrum-4 platform include:

NVIDIA Spectrum-4 switch family
NVIDIA ConnectX-7 smart NIC
NVIDIA Bluefield-3 DPU
DOCA data centre infrastructure software (used to program DPUs)

Spectrum-4 provides 4x faster switching throughput, up to 51.2 terabits per second with the new Spectrum-4 SN5000 family of switches supporting up to 128 ports of 400GbE. The Spectrum-4 ASIC also optimises RDMA over converged ethernet infrastructure, optimising data flow and protocols such as GPU-Direct access.

Spectrum-4 switches also support 12.8 terabits/second of MACsec and VXLANsec encryption making the Spectrum-4 platform the most secure networking platform for confidential computing and zero-trust architectures.

For the Omniverse, Sepctrum-4 switches bring nanosecond timing precision which enables the simulation of precise space and time in Omniverse applications. Moving to nanosecond precision is a 6x order of magnitude increase in accuracy compared to Spectrum-3 switch fabrics.

Availability

ConnectX-7 NICs are available now; Spectrum-4 switch systems and the Bluefield-3 DPUs will be available later in 2022.

High Performance Networking

In XENON’s 25+ years of experience in high performance computing we have been a leader in high performance networking solutions. XENON was Mellanox’s first solution partner, importer and distributor in Australia. After the purchase of Mellanox by NIVIDA to become NVIDIA Networking, XENON continues to be the leading NVIDIA Networking Partner in Australia.

XENON designs high performance networking solutions for HPC clusters, AI infrastructure, and data analytics applications.

XENON also designs high performance storage solutions which have the potential to saturate 400Gb/s Ethernet while also bringing extreme scale to manage petabytes of structured and unstructured data.