MetaRoCE: Meta's RDMA Transport#

Arvind Srinivasan (Meta), Kingshuk Mandal (Keysight Technologies)

• Why: Meta redesigned RDMA from scratch for clusters growing past a million accelerators, and its core bet — accept lossy Ethernet, push all transport intelligence into the NIC, decouple from topology — is the same architectural direction other frontier operators are taking. This is the overview talk: mechanisms, the topology it enables, and the standards push.
• What: MetaRoCE is a clean-sheet, multipath, out-of-order, receiver-driven RDMA transport that treats Ethernet as inherently lossy and pushes all intelligence into the NIC. Decoupling transport from topology is what makes TCO-optimized multiplane FPF topologies viable on commodity Ethernet with frictionless application adoption. A conformance suite developed with Keysight validates implementations from software reference through hardware emulation to production silicon, and Meta is opening MetaRoCE to the industry as a candidate ubiquitous RDMA transport for AI-scale networks. (from abstract only)
• How: NIC-resident intelligence with receiver-driven operation and out-of-order delivery, so the transport survives loss and reordering without requiring a lossless fabric underneath; multipath operation replaces fabric-wide coordination. The conformance suite is the mechanism for multi-vendor interoperability.
• Where applicable: Meta's accelerator clusters (million-scale, multi-region) and its multiplane FPF fabric plans — org-specific scale, but explicitly positioned for industry-wide adoption; the Keysight conformance chain signals serious intent for portability across NIC and silicon vendors.