Huawei releases an AI fabric white paper, helping to build an intelligent and lossless data centre network
Huawei released AI Fabric, Intelligent and Lossless Data Centre Network in the AI Era. The white paper presents the urgency and necessity of building an intelligent and lossless data centre network by seizing AI opportunities to monetise data value.
It elaborates on the unique technical advantages and customer benefits of using AI Fabric to build an intelligent and lossless network with zero packet loss, low latency, and high throughput. The release is a valuable reference for building next-generation data centre networks.
According to data analysis, 67% of CEOs among 2,000 cross-border companies have identified digitalisation as the core of their strategies.
Using AI to mine intelligence from the enormous amounts of data generated during digitalisation is a common practice. Huawei’s Global Industry Vision (GIV) predicts the AI procurement rate will reach 86% by 2025 – and leveraging AI to make decisions, reshape business models and ecosystems, and rebuild customer experiences will be a key driving force.
AI is driving the transformation of ICT architecture. Storage mediums have transitioned from Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) to Solid-State Drives (SSDs), latency has been reduced by 100 times, and CPUs for data processing have become GPUs (or even dedicated AI chips), with a 100-fold computing performance improvement.
Latency bottlenecks force the evolution of network communication from TCP/IP to Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). Distributed application architecture brings much collaboration between servers, and N:1 traffic exchanges and large-byte data packets aggravate network congestion.
The evolution of communication protocols and changes in application architecture not only call for network transformation, but also require intelligent scheduling and lossless forwarding to achieve zero packet loss, low latency, and high throughput for the intelligent and lossless data centre network.
At Huawei Connect 2018, Huawei launched the AI Fabric Intelligent and Lossless Data Centre Network Solution to help customers build RDMA networks that are compatible with traditional Ethernet networks. This solution provides optimal performance with zero packet loss, low latency, and high throughput for data centres. The white paper describes Huawei’s AI Fabric algorithm innovation in terms of congestion management and traffic control. One network carries three types of traffic: LAN, SAN, and IPC.
According to the EANTC, a third-party independent test institute in Europe, Huawei’s AI Fabric can effectively reduce the communication duration between HPC nodes by as much as 40%, greatly improving efficiency of innovative services such as AI training. .
“The popularity of the RDMA network is becoming a trend, and it has been deployed in some leading Internet enterprises,” Huawei Data Centre Network Domain general manager Leon Wang said. “The intelligent and lossless data centre network has become one of the transformation directions of the network in the AI era. Huawei’s AI Fabric is an innovative solution in the AI era. It accelerates data computing and storage efficiency, and brings dozens of folds of ROI to enterprises.”
Huawei’s AI Fabric has been successfully put into commercial use in leading enterprises such as the Internet and finance. It helps an Internet enterprise improve AI training efficiency and accelerate the commercial use of autonomous driving. AI Fabric helps China Merchants Bank improve cloud storage performance by 20%, and leads the retail banking 3.0 era.
For the entire white paper: AI Fabric, Intelligent and Lossless Data Centre Network in the AI Era
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