Alibaba Cloud reveals its datacenter design, homebrew network used for LLM training

Alibaba Cloud has revealed the design of an Ethernet-based network it created specifically to carry traffic for training large language models – and has used in production for eight months. The Chinese Cloud also revealed that its choice of Ethernet was informed by a desire to avoid vendor lock-in and leverage "the power of …

[Korev]

Yeah, but can it run Crysis?

[McCovican]

Wasted Energy

18MW? Whew lad, that's a whole lot of energy blown out of an AC stack just to create a whopping bunch of useless bullshit.

I know a guy in my office who can put out just as much bullshit and all it costs is a single taco.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Wasted Energy

What it won't be used for: Porn

What it will be used for: Censorship

Also I expect China will be eventually lead in applying AI to manufacturing, simply because 30% of the worlds export manufacturing takes place in China.

[JRStern]

How much does it utilize FP4?

And HBM is the big thang now at NVidia, so how do they cope with or without that?

[krakead]

Ah, Alibaba Cloud! The source of so much rogue bot traffic, we've blocked their entire ASN in the WAF!

[spacecadet66]

Just think of all the better uses all that equipment could be put to, such as being used for paperweights.