The year is 2025, AI has officially taken over your devices.. It’s helping you write emails, navigate traffic, write social media captions, and maybe even telling you what to eat for dinner.. It lives on your computer, your watch, its everywhere. The magical bots that can answer any questions you can think of, although they may not always provide a correct answer, it can give you something that at least sounds correct!
All that to say; we have all this AI power at the tip of our fingers, but how often do stop to think about how AI obtains its supernatural powers……? Naturally, we asked AI for it’s thoughts.
When we typed into ChatGPT, “What type of networking equipment is built to run AI computing?” here’s what it told us:
- High-Speed Networking Switches
- InfiniBand (Nvidia/Mellanox dominates in this space)
- AI-optimized Network Interface Cards
- Storage Networking
- Data Center Interconnect (DCI)
Today, we’re going to focus on #2, Mellanox InfiniBand. Specifically the 8500 series chassis. An absolute powerhouse and the backbone of many modern AI datacenters.
Why Mellanox InfiniBand?
Large scale AI models like, ChatGPT, DALL-E, GROK, and Co-Pilot, require massive GPU clusters to work in perfect sync to operate. Meaning they need to be able to process enormous volumes of data traffic between GPUs at top speed, with minimal latency.
This is where Infiniband shines. Mellanox specializes in delivering ultra-low latency and massive throughput, to keep these AI systems running in lockstep. Ensuring that they never falter when barraged with questions about what quick recipes you can make with the leftovers in your pantry! (and all the other important questions we pose to these all knowing artificial intelligence bots.)
Enter: The Mellanox 8500 Series
Behind the scenes of these AI datacenters, is the The Mellanox CS8500 Chassis, a beast built to handle these heavy AI workloads with ease. Represent a paradigm shift in data center networking, leveraging spine and leaf blade architecture to deliver unparalleled performance and scalability. The CS8500 Mellanox Quantum HDR Modular Switch, is Mellanox’ flagship 800-port HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand Smart Modular Switch.
Here are some quick stats about the CS8500.
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800 HDR 200Gb/s ports; 1600 HDR100 100Gb/s ports
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320Tb/s aggregate switch throughput
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Ultra low switch latency.
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N+N redundant & hot-swappable power.
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80+ platinum and energy star certified power supplies.
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x86 ComEx Broadwell CPU
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Liquid-cooled system
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7” Tablet LCD for best LED visibility
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RoHS-compliant
Per Mellanox: “CS8500 is an elegant modular switch designed for performance, serviceability, energy savings and high availability. The leaf blades, spine blades, and management modules, as well as the power supplies and fan units, are all hot-swappable to help eliminate down time. “
Each chassis complete with x20 MQM8510-H Mellanox Quantum InfiniBand leaf blades (40 QSFP56 ports), and 20 more MQM8520-H InfiniBand spine blades (40 QSFP56 ports).
Additionally, traditional network designs often suffer from bottlenecks and limited scalability. The Mellanox 8500 series overcome these limitations with spine and leaf architecture. With this model, the leaf blades connect directly to the servers or other endpoint devices (storage systems or GPU nodes) that process the data. The Spine blades interconnect all the leaf switches, forming the core of the network within the 8500 chassis. This design ensures that every server is only a short skip and jump to the next, dramatically reducing latency and increasing bandwidth.
Now where on earth would you find one of these working, day-to-day? you’d likely find these CS8500 chassis in AI research labs, datacenters for the magnificent seven (Microsoft, Google, Meta, NVIDIA), or anywhere else that demands a bit of high performance computing. Obviously a little overkill for your local ISP.
All things considered, these chassis are super exciting, top of the line, works of art. Which is why we are so excited to be able to work with them personally. Whether you’re building out a lab, upgrading a data center, or looking to super-future-proof your network, the 8500 is the peak of enterprise level networking.
If you want to see a video of one up and running, check out our LinkedIn, if your interested in having a conversation about one of these chassis, hit us up. Email us at [email protected], or hit the contact us button down below.
