Aquila: A unified, low-latency fabric for datacenter networks | Hacker News Reader

Aquila: A unified, low-latency fabric for datacenter networks

usenix.org

122 pointsdweekly11 comments

(not a hardware engineer) This looks like Google's version of Infiniband, which is basically mandatory for large scale ML-training servers due to issues with Ethernet, as described in the paper. Really cool stuff, wonder if we'll see traditional network hardware manufacturers copying this design.

InfiniPath / OmniPath dates back to 2004. Cornelis Networks sells the current generation.

If I recall correctly, this is a little more like Cray's Slingshot interconnect than Infiniband.

The latency numbers they state seem achievable or beatable with Infiniband, Amazon's EFA, or TCPDirect. 2us round-trip is achievable for very simple systems. If this kind of networking sounds good to you, you can buy it today! It's even available on AWS, Azure and Oracle Cloud (but not GCP yet AFAIK).

Latency measurements are tricky, the usual benchmarks kind of suck and aren't predictive of actual performance in real systems under load.

Given that the entire Myrinet team went to work for Google, and the InfiniPath microarchitecture can be discovered by reading the device driver and some open source code, I'm pretty sure Google's team was well aware of what has been done in the recent past.

Thank you upvoters! I wonder why my other comment has so many downvotes, when it's just as relevant as this one.

Off-topic, but that's an awesome name.

I remember the Aquila TV series, in the UK, fondly. Enough that I tracked down the books to read.

You could have some serious fun with a battle cruiser!

It’s bizarre how much I remember of that show, none of the Latin though.

Aquila means "eagle" in Italian.

There's also a city with the name Aquila, or "L'Aquila", where L' equates to "the", in the Abruzzo region. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Aquila

There was/is also a BBC TV show from late 90s about a "spacecraft" of the same name[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquila_(TV_series)

Same! Weirdly remember this programme more than most. The episode where it stops working until the dad cleans it specifically!

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