> if you spend the zillion dollars on switches and racks and power and cables and redundant power in your datacenter for infiniband(the only vendor: Nvidia), you get IB.
Worth noting that Nvidia/Mellanox is currently the only vendor for IB, but that has not always been the case. I had Intel IB switches for the backend network of my Isilon at my last job (we starting using them when they were 'just' Isilon, then EMC Isilon, and now Dell-EMC Isilon); only post-Dell did they start going Ethernet-only, and now with AI/ML they're re-offering IB as an option (LOL).
So Nvidia is kind of being 'rewarded' for sticking with a technology that everyone gave up on (I guess HPC wasn't big enough to bother with).
Besides IB, the other options being used in Top 500 are Slingshot (Eth-base?) and Omni-path (Category: Interconnect Family):
Worth noting that Nvidia/Mellanox is currently the only vendor for IB, but that has not always been the case. I had Intel IB switches for the backend network of my Isilon at my last job (we starting using them when they were 'just' Isilon, then EMC Isilon, and now Dell-EMC Isilon); only post-Dell did they start going Ethernet-only, and now with AI/ML they're re-offering IB as an option (LOL).
So Nvidia is kind of being 'rewarded' for sticking with a technology that everyone gave up on (I guess HPC wasn't big enough to bother with).
Besides IB, the other options being used in Top 500 are Slingshot (Eth-base?) and Omni-path (Category: Interconnect Family):
* https://www.top500.org/statistics/list/