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That’s essentially what RDMA is, except it is usually run over Infiniband although hyperscalers are wary of Nvidia’s control over the technology and looking for cheaper Ethernet-based alternatives.

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/what-is-rdma/

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3651890.3672233






If it's a secure internal network, RDMA is probably what you want if you need low-latency data transfer. You can do some very performance-oriented things with it and it works over ethernet or infiniband (the quality of switching gear and network cards matters, though).

Back in ~2012 I was setting up a high-frequency network for a forex company and at the time we deployed Mellanox and they had some very (at the time) bleeding edge networking drivers that significantly reduced the overhead of writing to TCP/IP sockets (particularily zero-copy which TL;DR meant data didn't get shifted around in memory as much and was written to the ethernet card's buffers almost straight away) that made a huge difference.

I eventually left the firm and my successors tried to replace it with cisco gear and Intel NICs and the performance plummeted. That made me laugh as I received so much grief pushing for the Mellanox kit (to be fair, they were a scrappy unheard of Israeli company at the time).




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