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The Ethernet ecosystem offers broad platform choice, flexible deployment, and highly scalable protocols with a plethora of functionality. Ethernet’s ubiquity ensures a thriving and competitive market that innovates rapidly. However, the stringent network demands of HPC, AI, and RDMA workloads have historically challenged Ethernet. The Ultra Ethernet Consortium was founded with a simple goal – take what’s good about traditional Infiniband RDMA and reimagine it as a first class Ethernet application. Ultra Ethernet Transport, a new native RDMA transport protocol defined by the UEC, contains everything necessary for a high performance HPC network. Packet spraying avoids hotspots in the network from bad hashing. New forms of congestion control react far faster than DCQCN to alleviate congestion in the network. Packet trimming and efficient retransmissions allow best effort networks to achieve first class performance without any head of line blocking. Combined with optimizations at the phy and link layer, UEC provides the foundation for high-performance Ethernet.
Through his story, Joe explores what’s needed beyond the lab to turn quantum potential into real-world impact — from building the right infrastructure to preparing the workforce of tomorrow. This session is a call to action for leaders across tech to get involved, reimagine what’s possible, and help shape the future while it’s still being written.
Tom Emmons leads the software engineering efforts for Arista’s AI and HPC backend/scale-
out networks. He’s worked extensively with Arista’s many customers to develop enhancements
to load balancing, congestion control, and performance monitoring for these networks. He also
serves as the chair of the Technical Advisory Committee for the UEC since June 2025. Having
joined Arista in 2011, Tom has an extensive background in networking, in particular writing
forwarding software to optimize network performance.
