Ultra Ethernet's Design Principles and Architectural Innovations

By Torsten Hoefler ^1,2, Karen Schramm ³, Eric Spada ³, Keith Underwood ⁴, Cedell Alexander ³, Bob Alverson ⁴, Paul Bottorff ⁴, Adrian Caulfield ⁵, Mark Handley ⁵, Cathy Huang ⁶, Costin Raiciu ³, Abdul Kabbani ⁷, Eugene Opsasnick ³, Rong Pan ⁸, Adee Ran ⁹, Rip Sohan ^8
1 ETH Zurich, Switzerland 
² Microsoft, USA
³ Broadcom,USA
⁴ Hewlett Packard Enterprise, USA
⁵ OpenAI,USA
⁶ Intel,USA
⁷ Microsoft, USA
⁸ AMD,USA
⁹ Cisco, USA

Abstract

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.

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