Understanding Scale-Out, Scale-Up, and Scale-Across Networking
Modern AI and HPC workloads place extraordinary demands on the underlying network infrastructure. And as network engineers, we are often pulled into conversations about GPU clusters, maybe without a clear map of the terrain.
Three terms come up constantly: scale-out, scale-up, and scale-across networking.
They describe fundamentally different network constraints and requirements. Here is a brief and simple explanation of each.