DriveNets and Broadcom Share Vision for Routing and AI Innovation

At DriveNets, our success goes hand in hand with Broadcom’s. Since our first steps in 2016, we’ve worked closely with Broadcom and its DNX family of ASICs. This collaboration has enabled us to build networks like cloud, delivering on the promise of disaggregated networking for our customers.

A journey of innovation and disaggregation

When DriveNets was founded in 2016, we set out to disrupt the networking industry by adopting the cloud model – disaggregating hardware and software and building a virtualized network infrastructure like the cloud’s. This Distributed Disaggregated Chassis (DDC) architecture required advanced networking silicon, which led to our technical collaboration with Broadcom’s DNX family of ASICs.

Broadcom’s Ramon and Jericho2 silicon enabled us to deliver our DriveNets Network Cloud solution. Instead of a traditional monolithic chassis, we created a rack-less fabric that can scale from a 2.4Tbps single white box to a cluster of dozens of white boxes delivering hundreds of terabits – all running as one logical router and all controlled from a single command line.

What began as a solution for large-scale telecom networks evolved to support new use cases that required high-scale, high-performance networking. In 2023, we launched DriveNets Network Cloud-AI.

High-performance AI networking with Ethernet

As the demand grew for high-performance backend network fabric for AI and HPC, many enterprises and cloud providers building their own AI clusters faced a challenging trade-off – either choose InfiniBand for its performance or Ethernet for its cost and flexibility. There was no solution that offered both high performance and standard Ethernet while supporting any infrastructure (GPUs and optics) and opening the networking supply chain to more vendors.

DriveNets Network Cloud-AI closes this gap. It delivers predictable, lossless, high-performance Ethernet-based networking that combines the openness of standard Ethernet with the performance levels of InfiniBand.

Broadcom’s Jericho3 and Ramon3 ASICs enable our scheduled fabric solution that leverages cell spray, end-to-end VOQs, and ultra-fast recovery performance to deliver predictable high-performance connectivity. Our solution overcomes the traditional limitations of Ethernet and delivers Ethernet with a similar performance to InfiniBand.

Broadcom Jericho4 – the next level of network performance

This week, Broadcom announced it is now shipping the new Jericho4 switch family. This advanced Ethernet routing silicon is designed to support the growing demands of large-scale service provider networks and AI workloads that require lossless connectivity at scale across data centers.

More and more AI backend networks are expanding beyond the boundaries of a single data center, driven by growing compute demands, power and space limitations, resiliency needs, and data locality requirements. But this shift presents a new challenge – how to create lossless, high-performance connectivity between multiple geographically distant sites.

The Jericho4 ASIC is purpose-built to solve these challenges by supporting high-performance transport over hundreds of kilometers, with deep-buffered congestion control and best-in-class interconnect efficiency.

Key features of Broadcom Jericho4 ASIC

• 51.2 Tbps scalable, deep-buffered capacity
• 3.2T HyperPort interfaces, improving job completion times by up to 40%
• End-to-end congestion management and lossless transport
• 40% power reduction per bit
• Compliance with Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) specifications
• Ability to work with any NIC or XPU Ethernet endpoint

Ethernet – the best solution for AI networking

Our Network Cloud-AI solution has already demonstrated industry-leading performance in Ethernet-based AI networking with multiple Jericho3 deployments for hyperscalers, neoclouds, and various pharma research companies and financial institutions. The new capabilities of Jericho4 will take this solution even further. DriveNets will leverage the cutting-edge Jericho4 technology to extend the unified AI fabric performance beyond the walls of a single data center and deliver lossless connectivity over great distances – even greater than 100km.

The combination of DriveNets’ software and Broadcom’s silicon has already proven to be a powerful partnership. It continues to play a key role in our mission to build the best network infrastructure for our customers.