The Data Center is the New Computer

Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox, said this several times during an IEEE HotInterconnects panel I hosted last August on SmartNICs. It was his key message, and like most marketing superstars he took it to the net, but it was perhaps too prophetic for most. How could a collection of hundreds of servers, from different vendors, ever be viewed as a single cohesive computer? The message hung with me for weeks, but it was eventually abandoned as the needs of everyday business pressed in, until last week.

While flying from Raleigh to San Jose on a Sunday evening I cracked open the latest issue of IEEE Computing Edge, March 2022, for some light reading and on page 24 an article titled "Interhost Orchestration Platform Architecture for Ultrascale Cloud Applications " smacked me in the face. Oh my god, imagine if all the VMs of a singular type within a data center could share the same address space. Then take this one step further with VMWare's Project Monterey, and have all the hypervisors hosted on the DPU's control plane complex. You could have a data center where 100% of all the x86 cores are dedicated to actual workloads!

If Project Monterey were to eventually leverage CXL , and the work mentioned in the above paper, we could have DPUs hosting VM's whose memory could be part of a singular address space across the entire data center, making the data center the new computer. While this may take several years to achieve, I'd say it's one impressive vision.