NVIDIA Spectrum-X is swiftly gaining traction as the leading networking platform tailored for AI in hyperscale cloud infrastructures. Spectrum-X networking technologies help enterprise customers accelerate generative AI workloads. NVIDIA announced significant OEM adoption of the platform in a November 2023 press release, along with an update on the NVIDIA Israel-1 Supercomputer powered by Spectrum-X.

NVIDIA now announces that Supermicro has joined as an OEM partner for the Spectrum-X platform. Spectrum-X will be incorporated into Supermicro GPU SuperServers, available in 4U, 5U, and 8U form factors, and will support NVIDIA GPUs in the NVIDIA HGX H100, NVIDIA H100, and NVIDIA L40S PCIe form factors.

These Supermicro systems significantly reduce the training and inference durations of large transformer-based generative AI models by delivering exceptional network performance, ensuring multi-tenant performance isolation, and enhancing energy efficiency. These advancements are achieved while adhering to Ethernet networking standards and leveraging the NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet switch and NVIDIA BlueField-3 SuperNIC.

NVIDIA looks forward to working with Supermicro to bring enhanced value to our joint AI cloud and hyperscale infrastructure customers.

NVIDIA Spectrum-X performance benchmarks

With the ongoing development of the NVIDIA Israel-1 data center, we have performed a variety of benchmarks that highlight the performance benefits of Spectrum-X. The initial results are excellent, as detailed below.

Basic network health (RDMA)

This first benchmark showcases the basic network health of the system. AI workloads are built around utilizing GPUs, and require high-bandwidth, low-latency communication between the GPU (and its onboard memory) and the network adapter connecting the server to the fabric.

RDMA bisection is a key indicator that the network is ready for AI, and Spectrum-X excels in this category. Compared to traditional Ethernet, it delivers over 4x higher effective bandwidth and over 4x lower latency. Traditional Ethernet includes RDMA and optimizations such as congestion notification and flow control.