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AI AND NETWORK with most of the real traffc staying ume of east-west traffc grew at an

TRAFFIC VOLUMES inside the data center, travelling be- even faster rate – and soon dwarfed

There are several reports that pre- tween servers in the same rack or racks north-south traffc levels. The east- dict a huge increase in the processing in the same building. west growth arose from virtualization, power required for AI applications as cloud computing, and the intensive well as the electrical power consumed TRAFFIC EVOLUTION use of databases and internal applica- by future AI workloads. Indeed, pow- As time evolved, however, an odd tions that require constant server-to- er consumption is already reaching thing happened, as highlighted in server communication. For example, critical levels in countries such as Sin- Figure 2. your Facebook page may look like a gapore and Ireland, where data center The volume of north-south traffc single pane of information, but it’s projects have been put on pause by grew steadily as companies migrated actually a collage of multiple informa- government intervention because of to cloud applications, but the vol- tion streams that come from different concerns over insuffcient capacity on their power grids. But there is very

Figure 1: Traffic flows little published data at the moment on the likely workload that AI will place on transport networks – be they metro, long-haul terrestrial, or even submarine links.

Is there a lesson to be learned from cloud computing?

As shown in Figure 1, two distinct types of traffc emerged in cloud com- puting 10 years ago.

NORTH-SOUTH: USER TO

NETWORK TRAFFIC

First was “user-to-network” traffc.

Because of the way PowerPoint dia- grams tend to be drawn, this is usually portrayed as running up and down, or north-south.

North-south traffc was originally

Figure 2: Traffic volumes thought to be the main contributor in a cloud architecture because users would need to move information back and forth to the cloud applications in the data center instead of running the applications locally.

EAST-WEST:

INTRA- AND INTER-DATA

CENTER TRAFFIC

The other type of traffc – east-west – is the local (intra-data center) and long-distance (inter-data center) traf- fc between servers. Initially, this was assumed to be just occasional updates, november/december 2024 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 47