HPE slingshot

HPE is selling what they call HPC Ethernet. This barely belongs in my collection of switch hardware. Extensions to Ethernet to create HPC Ethernet do not appear to have been written into a published standards document. The extensions to Ethernet are entirely aimed at an interconnect to build large scale array computers. As such, it would not be useful for campus or WAN networking. Ports can be configured for either HPC Ethernet mode or conventional Ethernet mode. The new switch ASIC is named rosetta. Slingshot is the name of the switch that contains the rosetta ASIC. Best info about this is:

https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/08/16/how-cray-makes-ethernet-suited-for-hpc-and-ai-with-slingshot

NextPlatform's guess is that Rosetta is a collaboration with Broadcom riffing on the Tomahawk3. Some of the changes to Ethernet are to allow for shorter minimum sized packets and to provide for packet-by-packet routing through a mesh interconnect.

Slingshot is available in both air cooled and liquid cooled models. What there is not are model numbers for the switches. HPE makes the point that packet buffering is the enemy of low latency networking. This may be the reason that packet buffer size has not been announced. Slingshot switches have ways to guarantee packet delivery not based on buffering.