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Equation 19 · Part 8 · The Physical Plant: Power, Cooling, and Networks in an AI Datacenter

multiplication

Tring≈2 p−1p⋅NB+2 (p−1) α,T_{\mathrm{ring}} \approx 2\,\frac{p-1}{p}\cdot\frac{N}{B} + 2\,(p-1)\,\alpha,
multiplication

What this part means

Multiply the quantities on either side.

Its job in the formula

Multiply the quantities on either side.

The passage around this formula

The cost structure of a collective is arithmetic, not policy. For a ring AllReduce over p ranks reducing N bytes at per-link bandwidth B with per-hop latency α\alpha , each rank moves Tring≈2 p−1p⋅NB+2 (p−1) αT_{\mathrm{ring}} \approx 2\,\frac{p-1}{p}\cdot\frac{N}{B} + 2\,(p-1)\,\alpha. so bandwidth cost saturates near 2N/B while the latency term grows linearly in p . Two consequences follow. The slowest link sets the pace for every rank, because the operation does not complete until all ranks have contributed. And large jobs avoid large collectives: Meta reports that multi-dimensional parallelism keeps “the number of GPUs in the largest collective to hundreds of GPUs even when running a job that is tens of thousands of GPUs,” which is why their analysis focuses on…

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Learn the underlying idea

Multiplication scales one quantity by another. A dot, a cross, or adjacent symbols can indicate a product.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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