Leading Cloud Service, Semiconductor, and System Providers Unite to Form Ultra Ethernet Consortium

UEC to deliver on Ethernet-based open, interoperable, high-performance full-communications stack architecture to meet the growing network demands of AI & HPC at scale

San Francisco – July 19, 2023

Announced today, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet’s ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.

Ultra Ethernet Consortium is founded by companies with long-standing history and experience in high-performance solutions. Each member is contributing significantly to the broader ecosystem of high-performance in an egalitarian manner. The founding members include AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, who collectively have decades of networking, AI, cloud and high-performance computing-at-scale deployments.

“This isn’t about overhauling Ethernet,” said Dr. J Metz, Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. “It’s about tuning Ethernet to improve efficiency for workloads with specific performance requirements. We’re looking at every layer – from the physical all the way through the software layers – to find the best way to improve efficiency and performance at scale.”

The consortium will work on minimizing communication stack changes while maintaining and promoting Ethernet interoperability.

The technical goals for the consortium are to develop specifications, APIs and source code to define:

• Protocols, electrical and optical signaling characteristics, application program interfaces and/or data structures for Ethernet communications
• Link-level and end-to-end network transport protocols to extend or replace existing link and transport protocols
• Link-level and end-to-end congestion, telemetry and signaling mechanisms; each of the foregoing suitable for artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing environments
• Software, storage, management and security constructs to facilitate a variety of workloads and operating environments

UEC will follow a systematic approach with modular, compatible, interoperable layers with tight integration to provide a holistic improvement for demanding workloads. The founding companies are seeding the consortium with highly valuable contributions in four working groups: Physical Layer, Link Layer, Transport Layer and Software Layer.

UEC is a Joint Development Foundation project hosted by The Linux Foundation.UEC will begin accepting applications for new members in Q4 2023. More information can be found at ultraethernet.org

View Quotes from Founding Members and Industry Analysts

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About Ultra Ethernet Consortium

Ultra Ethernet Consortium brings together companies for industry-wide cooperation on interoperability and to build a complete Ethernet based communication stack architecture, that best matches the rapidly evolving AI/HPC workloads at scale and provides for best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and TCO as well as developer and end-user friendliness.  UEC is a Joint Development Foundation Projects, LLC Series, an affiliate of the Linux Foundation. The founding members include AMD, Arista,  Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel,  Meta, Microsoft.  Learn more at ultraethernet.org.

About The Joint Development Foundation

The Joint Development Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation Family, provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable organizations to develop technical specifications, standards, data sets, and source code. JDF projects such as Ultra Ethernet Consortium, Alliance for Open Media, Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, and Overture Maps Foundation innovate markets, lead change, and champion open participation and licensing policies. For more information, please visit us at jointdevelopment.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contacts

The Linux Foundation: Noah Lehman – nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

Eviden: Constance Arnoux – constance.arnoux@atos.net