GPU fabric topologies

The network of an AI cluster is built in layers, and each layer uses different interconnects — and different optics. Understanding the layers explains why a cluster has so many transceivers and where a bad one hurts most.

Scale-up vs scale-out

Pluggable transceivers live mostly in the scale-out layer — every GPU server has several 400G/800G ports towards the fabric, plus separate front-end/storage networking.

Fat-tree and non-blocking

The scale-out fabric is usually a fat-tree (Clos): leaf switches connect servers, spine switches connect leaves, with enough leaf–spine uplinks that any server can talk to any other at full rate (non-blocking). Most of a cluster's optics are these leaf–spine and server–leaf links — thousands of identical DR4/DR8 modules.

Rail-optimised design

Training traffic is dominated by collective operations between GPUs of the same rank across servers. A rail-optimised topology exploits this: GPU 0 of every server connects to leaf switch 0, GPU 1 to leaf 1 and so on, so GPUs of the same rank are one hop apart and collectives never cross the spine. The consequence for optics: a fault on a single rail affects one GPU position in every server — a pattern worth recognising.

Separate networks

A cluster typically runs several physically separate fabrics:

• Compute fabric — GPU-to-GPU (IB or RoCE), the largest and most optic-intensive.
• Storage fabric — to parallel file systems and object storage, often Ethernet (storage networking).
• Front-end / management — user access, orchestration, telemetry.

Each has its own optics inventory and its own vendor-validation rules.

Why one bad link matters so much

A collective operation completes at the speed of its slowest participant. One transceiver with a degrading lane — higher FEC corrections, occasional retransmits — stretches the tail latency of every step and can cost a measurable fraction of the whole cluster's throughput. That is why AI operators trend per-lane DDM across the fleet and replace optics proactively (Transceivers in AI clusters).

In CodingBox

Bench-qualify optics before they go into a rail: identity per CMIS, per-lane DDM baseline on the DDM screen, and a record in the code database so a module's history is available when a rail starts showing errors.

The adapters at the GPU end of these fabrics — BlueField, ConnectX-8 SuperNIC, Pensando — and their twin-port OSFP optics: SmartNICs and DPUs.