Re:Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware tran...
by pkhuong on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @09:39AM
(#37928502)
Google migrated away from IB years ago. IIUC, the failure modes at the time (e.g., fully locked up fabric) were too painful at the time, and they preferred to work with a mostly vanilla Linux kernel for userspace networking.
Re:Google opens Falcon, a reliable low-latency hardware tran...
by pclmulqdq on Wednesday October 18, 2023 @10:59AM
(#37929653)
Infiniband and most other specialized protocols have data-link-layer reliable messaging. The downside of this is that a congested switch cannot drop packets, so you end up backpressuring your network to death unless the people writing software really know what they're doing. Google was not able to make this work at scale.
Actually it's interesting that google didn't choose any of these, for high bandwidth storage.