7700R4 Series Distributed Etherlink Switch

The Arista 7700R4 Distributed Etherlink Switch (DES) is the first in a new series of ultra-scalable, smart distributed systems that take the architectural foundations of the 7800R beyond the confines of a chassis to deliver thousands of 800GbE ports and Petabits per second of capacity combined with perfect fairness and lossless packet delivery - imperative for supporting large scale, open, AI and ML applications built on any flavor of XPU. The Ultra Ethernet ready DES system is designed exclusively to support the needs of leading edge, very large scale Ethernet based generative AI clusters which depend on the interconnect between accelerators for the efficient execution of thousands of simultaneous high bandwidth transactions. Congestion, packet loss and failure can dramatically reduce the efficiency of a workload or potentially lead to a stall in processing, all of which reduce the useful working time and therefore return on investment (ROI) of high value compute farms. The unique scalability and fully co-ordinated logical single-hop behavior is made possible by an automated and fully hardware accelerated architectural framework. Massively parallel, distributed, end-to-end scheduling combined with deterministic traffic spraying across all available leaf-spine interfaces delivers 100% efficient path utilization and equality to all traffic flows with no tuning required. These are critical attributes for supporting both single large workloads as well as mixed multi-tenant and multi-generational jobs in parallel. As a distributed system, DES is designed for pay-as-you-grow scaling starting from hundreds of ports, with a predictable, linear CapEx and OpEx trajectory to maximum capacity. Arista Etherlink for AI adds layers of smart, workload specific functionality improving, traffic management, configuration consistency and visibility - critical factors in building, operating and troubleshooting very large clusters and minimizing downtime.