Meta opens AI network transport software and submits switch platform specification

Meta says it is making its MetaRoCE network transport software available as open source, starting with a user-space implementation on GitHub called libsoftmetaroce. The transport addresses communication between accelerators in AI clusters, where collective operations can be limited by the slowest node across hundreds of thousands of accelerators. Meta also announced that the Open Switch Platform Architecture initiative, co-led with Microsoft and Alibaba, submitted its 1.0 specification to the Open Compute Project. The proposed reference design targets the proprietary switch platform layer, where fragmented implementations add months of duplicated integration work per platform. A DPDK-based version of MetaRoCE is still forthcoming.