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dates, with most of the real traf? c staying inside the data

AI and Network Traf? c Volumes

There are several reports that predict a huge increase in center, travelling between servers in the same rack or racks the processing power required for AI applications as well in the same building.

as the electrical power consumed by future AI workloads.

Traf? c Evolution

Indeed, power consumption is already reaching critical lev- els in countries such as Singapore and Ireland, where data As time evolved, however, an odd thing happened, as high- center projects have been put on pause by government in- lighted in Figure 2.

tervention because of concerns over insuf? cient capacity on The volume of north-south traf? c grew steadily as companies their power grids. But there is very little published data at the migrated to cloud applications, but the volume of east-west moment on the likely workload that AI will place on trans- traf? c grew at an even faster rate – and soon dwarfed north- port networks – be they metro, long-haul terrestrial, or even south traf? c levels. The east-west growth arose from virtual- submarine links. ization, cloud computing, and the intensive use of databases

Is there a lesson to be learned from cloud computing? and internal applications that require constant server-to-server

As shown in Figure 1, two distinct types of traf? c emerged in communication. For example, your Facebook page may look cloud computing 10 years ago. like a single pane of information, but it’s actually a collage of multiple information streams that come from different parts of the virtualized cloud of storage. And this east-west growth can

North-South: User to Network Traf? c

First was “user-to-network” traf? c. Because of the way Pow- happen over long distances. erPoint diagrams tend to be drawn, this is usually portrayed as To explain why, let’s look at the Facebook model, which is running up and down, or north-south. driven by advertising revenue. As a U.K. resident, I spend

North-south traf? c was originally thought to be the main most of my money here, so if I travel to the U.S. or around contributor in a cloud architecture because users would need Asia, there’s no point in serving me U.S. or Asia ads – the to move information back and forth to the cloud applications Facebook data center in Singapore, for example, has to syn- in the data center instead of running the applications locally. chronize with one of their three data centers in Europe to re- trieve the appropriate advertising and deliver it with low la- tency so I don’t scroll past it before it’s delivered, because

East-West: intra- and inter-data Center Traf? c

The other type of traf? c – east-west – is the local (intra-data then Facebook would not get paid for my “eyeballs.” East- center) and long-distance (inter-data center) traf? c between west traf? c also means that data centers can load-balance and servers. Initially, this was assumed to be just occasional up- act as resilient backup.

FIGURE 1:

Traf? c ? ows www.marinetechnologynews.com 37

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