Terrabit Network is a platform focused on Linux technology and tips.
Terrabit Network is a platform focused on Linux technology and tips.
This was challenging a few years back, but now it's achievable to connect a 1Tbit network to 1000Gbit between two computers at a fair cost. The setup would include: three Mellanox ConnectX-6 dual 200Gbit Ethernet cards, six QSFP28 cables (copper or fiber), Windows Server 2019 with an appropriate CPU and mainboard, at least 48 PCIe lanes, high-speed RAM (or quad channel), direct memory access for each NIC, and a load-balanced failover configuration in Windows. The result would be a single NIC handling over 1Tbit after overhead, easily exceeding 1Tbit.
QSFP28 supports a maximum of 28x4 gigabits per second. The price is around five thousand dollars.
Clean setup but the real use comes when sharing RAM and CPU across multiple systems for tasks like deep learning or heavy computing. Once you move into permanent storage, even PCI_e SSDs can't match the connection speed. Since most servers keep main data on spinning platters (perhaps with a cache), you'd be dealing with network speeds that are unnecessarily fast compared to your local storage. Honestly, 40Gbit is sufficient for any application I know.
You're asking if you need 400GbE for the server connection and 1TbE for the core link.