I am genuinely curious to see what types of "compute-intensive" applications fit the bill here. Outside of storage workloads (syncing data, etc.), why would you need a 100x improvement in data transfer rates between the machines? (We have TPUs and their specialized network architecture for ML-like workloads ...)
Physical distance between the machines in a DC prevents RAM style "shared-memory" architectures, at least ones that aim to have 30~60ns access times (10-20 meters). Unless there are new paradigms for computation in a distributed setting, I don't see the benefit for this ...
Also, what are the fundamental limitations/research problems of todays hardware that prevent us from building a 400G NIC? I cannot think of anything outside of PCI-e bus getting saturated. We already have 400G ports on switches ...
Physical distance between the machines in a DC prevents RAM style "shared-memory" architectures, at least ones that aim to have 30~60ns access times (10-20 meters). Unless there are new paradigms for computation in a distributed setting, I don't see the benefit for this ...
Also, what are the fundamental limitations/research problems of todays hardware that prevent us from building a 400G NIC? I cannot think of anything outside of PCI-e bus getting saturated. We already have 400G ports on switches ...