Meta deploys Arista 7700R4 Distributed Etherlink Switch for AI cluster

In a blog post, Arista Networks (ANET) said that Meta (META) has deployed the Arista 7700R4 Distributed Etherlink Switch for its latest Ethernet-based AI cluster. “It’s useful to reflect on how we arrived at this point and the strength of the partnership with Meta,” Arista said. “The AI market changed when ChatGPT burst onto the world and created an unprecedented stir about cognitive AI’s power, impact, and benefits that started to resonate with the wider world. Arista’s partnership with Meta on co-development dates back to the “7368X4″ minipack 100G system released in 2018, followed by successive iterations of OCP-inspired systems that are widely deployed. However, Arista’s experience in HPC, AI and machine learning goes back to the company’s original foundation when many of the first customers were building large compute networks to process workloads – for Oil and Gas, Research, Medical, Finance and others. What characterized the networking requirements in 2008 are not so different from those in 2024 – non-blocking performance, high-speed interfaces, traffic management tools, monitoring and visibility. What has changed is the scale. A typical HPC cluster in 2010 was running at 10G Ethernet, with several hundred nodes connected to a network of modular 7500E series systems. In 2024, the de facto speed is 400G Ethernet, with interconnects running at 800G, and the scale of the AI cluster has increased to many thousands of compute nodes, each containing multiple XPUs. As large AI language models (LLM) expand, higher bandwidths and ever-more challenging workloads are best suited to Ethernet-the debate on IB is resolved!”