China’s tech giants deliver chips for Ethernet variant tuned to HPC and AI workloads

'Global Scheduling Ethernet' looks a lot like tech the Ultra Ethernet Consortium is also working on

Chinese tech giants last week announced the debut of chips to power a technology called "Global Scheduling Ethernet" that is intended to offer a version of the networking protocol tuned to the needs of AI and other demanding workloads.

Mega-carrier China Mobile appears to be the driving force behind the tech, as in 2023 it published a white paper [PDF] describing the technical framework for "GSE Ethernet."

The project appears to have the same motives as the Utra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) – a group whose members include Intel, AMD, HPE, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Meta and Microsoft, and that wants to optimize Ethernet for AI and HPC applications.

The UEC wants a version of Ethernet tuned to the needs of such applications, because the protocol wasn't created with today's workloads in mind. It can be hard to arrange paths for traffic to move over very large and busy networks, resulting in high latency.

China Mobile's white paper spells out similar ambitions, and suggests they can be addressed with techniques like fixed-size packet containers and a "dynamic global scheduling queue" that isn't tied to physical ports but considers the state of the target device port before arranging an optimal connection using tricks like multi-path spraying [PDF].

The UEC, for what it's worth, also sees promise in multi-path spraying.

Chinese media coverage from last week reports that 50-plus cloud service providers, equipment manufacturers, chip manufacturers, and universities inside and beyond China have worked on the tech, which debuted last week in the form of a mysterious chip that makes GSE Ethernet a reality.

Other reporting suggests GSE Ethernet has already been deployed in a thousand-machine cluster at a China Mobile datacenter, where it apparently delivered substantial network performance improvements during training of a large language model.

The Register asked China Mobile to comment on GSE Ethernet, but did not receive a response. Networking experts of our acquaintance weren't aware of the project.

If China has decided to create and use a home-grown version of Ethernet for some applications – and its big tech companies are willing to use it – that's their choice to make. It does mean, though, that the Chinese market (and nations where Chinese vendors dominate) will be harder to target for members of the UEC.

Consider, too, the possibility that GSE Ethernet outperforms UEC – an outcome that would likely draw the attention of Western governments who want to make it harder for Chinese companies to build the kit that makes it work. In that event it's feasible we could see trade sanctions and technology transfer bans directed at an Ethernet fork.

What a time to be alive. ®