Cheap Desktop 400GbE Switch MikroTik CRS804-4DDQ-HRM Review

I haven’t been directly involved in networking for a while, so it was funny to tune back in and see that now not only is 10Gbps apparently no big deal, they even put it on the management interface!

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avidiax 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there an actual use for this in a homelab? Isn't 25gbps enough that no SSD will saturate it?

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hgoel 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

DGX Sparks have 200Gbps interlinks for clustering. Apparently switches are the only practical way to scale such clusters beyond 2 nodes even though each Spark has 2 such ports.

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MarkSweep 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The second sentence of the article:

> We have a number of these now and have been running our RDMA network backend for the 8x NVIDIA GB10 cluster for several months now, using one.

I have a friend who uses something similar for his 4 NVIDIA GDX Spark cluster.

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avidiax 26 minutes ago | parent [-]

I see, so only if you are running an AI cluster. And what is it transferring between the nodes? Partial computations?

	▲	ericd 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Essentially, yes. The DGX Sparks, at 128 gigs for ~$4700 are one of the cheapest ways to get enough high-ish speed memory cobbled together to run one of the more capable open weight models to run at home/for a small biz. This switch lets you combine the memory of 2-4 of them.

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corvad 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean at lot of what a homelab is experimenting. For example I have an absurd amount of communication 56GbE Mellanox switches but never really saturate it.

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iso1631 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> While $1100 is not a low number

It really is when you're talking 400G.

OK there's very few ports on this, but in general if you're looking at 400g interfaces. $1100 won't even get you a genuine Arista 400G passive DAC.