Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 InfiniBand switch with 57 billion transistors for massive GPU cluster interconnection.

NVIDIA has announced its next-generation InfiniBand networking platform, NVIDIA Quantum-2, designed for cloud computing companies and supercomputing centers. The platform features a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking system that includes the new NVIDIA Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and supporting software. In total, the NVIDIA Quantum-2 contains 57 billion transistors, surpassing NVIDIA's flagship A100 GPU which has 54 billion transistors.

According to Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of Networking at NVIDIA: "The requirements of today's supercomputing centers and public clouds are converging. They must provide the greatest performance possible for next-generation HPC, AI, and data analytics challenges, while also securely isolating workloads and responding to varying demands of user traffic. This vision of the modern data center is now real with NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand." The platform addresses the need for high performance with advanced multi-tenancy to accommodate many users.

The new Quantum-2 delivers significant performance improvements compared to previous generations, featuring 2x the network speed and 3x the network ports, while also boosting performance by 3x and reducing the need for data center fabric switches by 6x. Additionally, the system reduces power consumption and required data center space by 7% each. NVIDIA is offering the platform with 64 ports at 400Gbps or 128 ports at 200Gbps, with multiple switch systems supporting up to 2048 ports at 400Gbps or 4096 ports at 200Gbps—representing over 5x the switching capability of the previous-generation Quantum-1.

The Quantum-2 InfiniBand switch is manufactured on TSMC 7nm silicon, while the new ConnectX-7 NIC features 8 billion transistors on the same 7nm design. The ConnectX-7 doubles the data rate of the previous-generation NVIDIA ConnectX-6 and will sample in January 2022. The new NVIDIA Quantum-2 switch is currently available from leading infrastructure and system vendors including Atos, DataDirect Networks (DDN), Dell Technologies, Excelero, GIGABYTE, HPE, IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, NEC, Penguin Computing, QCT, Supermicro, VAST Data, and WekaIO.