Oct 12, 2026
OCP Summit 2026: Powering AI with Open Innovations in Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across Networks · Engineering at Meta
Science, Technology & Innovation · Oct 12, 2026
Meta’s Flattened Planar Fabric (FPF) uses eight independent 100G GPU-to-switch links and NIC packet spraying across network planes, with host software coordinating with switches to avoid failures. By flattening a three-tier Clos into two tiers, it aims to reduce latency, hops, and cost, but shifts fault tolerance and portability requirements onto coordinated GPU hosts, NICs, and network control systems.
OCP Summit 2026: Powering AI with Open Innovations in Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across Networks · Engineering at Meta
Science, Technology & Innovation · Oct 12, 2026
Meta, Microsoft, and Alibaba submitted OSPA v1.0 to the OCP to standardize switch-platform interfaces for hardware management, complementing SAI’s portable data-plane software. The specification and Meta’s self-service FBOSS onboarding aim to reduce duplicated engineering, maintenance costs, and hardware adoption time by enabling vendors to integrate platforms independently.
OCP Summit 2026: Powering AI with Open Innovations in Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across Networks · Engineering at Meta
Science, Technology & Innovation · Oct 12, 2026
Meta’s Backend Aggregation layer is designed to unify geographically distributed facilities into one AI training cluster by measuring real path distances, dynamically sizing Ethernet buffers, balancing traffic by available capacity, and limiting costly cross-region collective communication.
OCP Summit 2026: Powering AI with Open Innovations in Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across Networks · Engineering at Meta
Science, Technology & Innovation · Oct 12, 2026
Meta is extending Ethernet into accelerator-rack scale-up networking: its Tahan system connects 16 MTIA 300 accelerators with Broadcom Tomahawk 5 switches using the same IPv6, PFC, QoS, and RoCE stack as scale-out networks, while a planned Tomahawk6C design will connect 72 accelerators and adopt OCP’s ESUN data plane. This points toward shared Ethernet operations across intra- and inter-rack fabrics, with competition shifting to ESUN compliance and dense implementations.
OCP Summit 2026: Powering AI with Open Innovations in Scale-Up, Scale-Out, and Scale-Across Networks · Engineering at Meta
Science, Technology & Innovation · Oct 12, 2026
Meta’s IcePack liquid-cooled rack brings 102.4-Tbps Ethernet switching into dense AI infrastructure, combining 128×800G IceCube blades, Broadcom or NVIDIA ASIC options, and shared FBOSS/SAI software; this makes power, cooling, rack design, and network software an integrated deployment concern.