Nokia successfully completed an end-to-end Ultra Ethernet test across data center switching platforms, demonstrating capabilities for AI data center buildout.

The demonstration was carried out with electronics manufacturer Keysight Technologies. It used Nokia's 7220 Interconnect Router (IXR) and 7250 IXR tuned to Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) Specification 1.0 capabilities.

The demo tested 800 Gb/s Ethernet (GE) interfaces with streams of Ultra Ethernet Transport (UET) traffic across a network that encompassed all variants of the Nokia 7220 and 7250 products. Those platforms ran the Service Router (SR) Linux Network Operating System (NOS) during the test, while traffic flows were generated using a Keysight testing platform.

The demo also tested in parallel current support for remote direct memory access (RDMA) over converged ethernet (RoCEv2) at 800 GE flows.

According to Nokia, Ultra Ethernet can help address complex demands of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI development in low latency, zero packet loss, and large bandwidth.

UEC and Ultra Ethernet

Nokia is a UEC member and uses current UEC standards for its data fabric portfolio. That portfolio underpin Nscale’s European data center buildout,

UEC's 1.0 specification is designed to support a high-performance and scalable solution across each layer of the networking stack, including switches, optics, and cables. It also includes a modern RDMA approach to support low-latency transport for high-throughput environments, open standards, end-to-end scalability, and interoperability to avoid vendor lock-in.

Those standards are seeing real-world use cases, with founding UEC member AMD announcing in June that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) deployed what it claimed was the first Ultra Ethernet-compliant network interface card (NIC), the 400GbE Pensando Pollara.

Vendors are preparing AI training and inference demands. A recent report by Dell’Oro Group found AI led to a 51% increase in global data center capex in 2024, hitting $455 billion in investment.

650 Group has argued this AI demand will push Ethernet, fueled by growing adoption of 800 Gb/s (800G) and eventually 1.6 Tb/s (1.6T) system capacity, past InfiniBand as “the dominant technology for scale-out” by the end of this year, generating more than $8 billion in revenues.