Announced today, Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is bringing together leading companies for industry-wide cooperation to build a complete Ethernet-based communication stack architecture for high-performance networking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are rapidly evolving and require best-in-class functionality, performance, interoperability and total cost of ownership, without sacrificing developer and end-user friendliness. The Ultra Ethernet solution stack will capitalize on Ethernet's ubiquity and flexibility for handling a wide variety of workloads while being scalable and cost-effective.

Ultra Ethernet Consortium is founded by companies with long-standing history and experience in high-performance solutions. Each member is contributing significantly to the broader ecosystem of high-performance in an egalitarian manner. The founding members include AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden (an Atos Business), HPE, Intel, Meta and Microsoft, who collectively have decades of networking, AI, cloud and high-performance computing-at-scale deployments."This isn't about overhauling Ethernet," said Dr. J Metz, Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium. "It's about tuning Ethernet to improve efficiency for workloads with specific performance requirements. We're looking at every layer - from the physical all the way through the software layers - to find the best way to improve efficiency and performance at scale."

The consortium will work on minimizing communication stack changes while maintaining and promoting Ethernet interoperability.

The technical goals for the consortium are to develop specifications, APIs, and source code to define:

• Protocols, electrical and optical signaling characteristics, application program interfaces and/or data structures for Ethernet communications.
• Link-level and end-to-end network transport protocols to extend or replace existing link and transport protocols.
• Link-level and end-to-end congestion, telemetry and signaling mechanisms; each of the foregoing suitable for artificial intelligence, machine learning and high-performance computing environments.

Software, storage, management and security constructs to facilitate a variety of workloads and operating environments.
UEC will follow a systematic approach with modular, compatible, interoperable layers with tight integration to provide a holistic improvement for demanding workloads. The founding companies are seeding the consortium with highly valuable contributions in four working groups: Physical Layer, Link Layer, Transport Layer and Software Layer.

UEC is a Joint Development Foundation project hosted by The Linux Foundation. UEC will begin accepting applications for new members in Q4 2023.