> FWIW, I wouldn't be surprised if the high-performance RDMA networks being put together for AI workloads were the thing that grew into the "next" thing.
Maybe we were just early in giving (HFT) customers RDMA back in ~2007[1][2] but I don't see it entering the mainstream anytime soon. And after a relatively short 20 years of adoption, the "next" thing for hyperscalers is not going to be the next thing for everyone else.
HFT networks are also a lot smaller than hyperscaler datacenters, and designed with more cross-sectional bandwidth. A good chunk of the traffic (trading-related messages) also tends to not use congestion control.
In large web company datacenters, RDMA and RoCE have had a much "rockier" path forward.
Maybe we were just early in giving (HFT) customers RDMA back in ~2007[1][2] but I don't see it entering the mainstream anytime soon. And after a relatively short 20 years of adoption, the "next" thing for hyperscalers is not going to be the next thing for everyone else.
[1] https://downloads.openfabrics.org/Media/IB_LowLatencyForum_2...
[2] https://www.thetradenews.com/wombat-and-voltaire-break-milli...