HPE Networking Data Center Scale-up Networking with Ethernet for Helios

AMD Helios delivers massive, rack-scale AI architectures, backed by HPE expertise in liquid cooling, system integration, and high-performance networking. Helios effectively announces the arrival of Ethernet into the scale-up domain, which has been dominated by proprietary protocols. Customers will now benefit from the Ethernet ecosystem that relentlessly drives down costs, pushes innovation forward faster, and brings operational consistency across all AI fabric domains. At Networking Field Day 41, Mike Wong, senior director of product management for Helios rack networking at HPE Networking, detailed the rack and the scale-up switch tray HPE built for it.

Wong described Helios as an open-standard alternative to single-vendor rack-scale systems. It is built on the double-width Open Rack Wide specification and holds 72 AMD MI455 GPUs with 432 GB of HBM each, or 31 TB per rack. The scale-up network uses UALink over Ethernet, so GPUs keep memory-access semantics while running on the Ethernet ecosystem. Each GPU gets 3.6 TB/s of bidirectional bandwidth, and the rack totals 260 TB/s. Wong confirmed for a delegate that these figures are in bytes, not bits. AMD Vulcano NICs provide up to three 800 Gbps scale-out connections per GPU, and Pensando Salina handles front-end and storage traffic. HPE also supplies the management network. The switch tray occupies a single rack unit. It pairs two 102.4 Tbps Tomahawk 6 chips for 204.8 Tbps of raw bandwidth, uses direct liquid cooling on the silicon and retimers, and connects through 200G flyover cables to deliver full-mesh, non-blocking, single-hop GPU connectivity.

Wong said HPE drew on its experience delivering the industry’s first liquid-cooled Tomahawk 6 switch to make around a thousand power and signal integrity changes to AMD’s reference design. He framed this as stability work, because network disruptions waste expensive GPU time. HPE also plans to extend its Mist AI operations tooling from scale-out into the rack, giving operators end-to-end visibility without blind spots. HPE will assemble, test, and crate racks for worldwide drop shipment and provide deployment services that cover cooling distribution units. Wong added that a single rack isn’t meaningful on its own. Customers need a scale-out design suited to their cluster size and load balancing, which HPE supports through Juniper Validated Designs.