Level Up Your Network: Collective Communication Algorithms in AI/ML

You know networks. You build them, optimize them, and troubleshoot them. But have you considered how crucial they are to the AI revolution? The massive scale of modern Machine Learning models isn't possible without distributed training, and that relies on efficient collective communication algorithms. These algorithms orchestrate the complex dance of data exchange between multiple devices (often GPUs), and the network is the stage where this performance happens.

Let's break down some key concepts, looking at them through a network engineer's lens: