Google is contributing its Falcon hardware transport protocol to the Open Compute Project.
Falcon is a hardware-assisted transport layer designed for high-performance, low-latency connections in Ethernet data center networks.
It leverages production-proven technologies including Carousel, Snap, Swift, PLB, and CSIG.
Falcon can support RDMA and NVM Express as well as other Upper layer protocols (ULPs).
Some industry perspectives shared by Google:
“We welcome Google’s contribution of Falcon as it shares the Ultra Ethernet Consortium’s vision to drive Ethernet as the best data center fabric for AI and HPC, and look forward to continuing industry innovations in this important space.” – Dr. J Metz, Chair, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (led by AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle).
“Falcon is first available in the Intel IPU E2000 series of products. The value of these IPUs is further enhanced as the first instance of an Ethernet transport to add low tail latency and congestion handling at scale. Intel is a Steering Member of Ultra Ethernet Consortium, which is working to evolve Ethernet for high performance AI and HPC workloads. We plan to deploy the resulting standards-based enhancements in future IPU and Ethernet products.” – Sachin Katti, SVP & GM, Network and Edge Group, Intel.
“We are pleased to see a high-performance transport protocol for critical workloads such as AI and HPC that works over standard Ethernet/IP networks and enables massive application bandwidth at scale.” – Hugh Holbrook, Group VP, SW Eng., Arista Networks.
“Cisco is pleased to see the contribution of Falcon to the OCP. Cisco has long supported open standards and believes in broad ecosystems. The rate and scale of modern data center networks and particularly AI/ML networks is unprecedented, presenting a challenge and opportunity to the industry. Falcon addresses many of the challenges of these networks, enabling efficient network utilization.” – Ofer Iny, Cisco Fellow, Cisco.