OCP 2026 - Alibaba/Cisco: SRv6 Traffic Engineering in AI DCI/WAN for AI Traffic
At the OCP Global Summit 2026 (opencompute.org), Yuanchao Su of Alibaba Cloud and Clarence Filsfils of Cisco Systems presented “Traffic Engineering in AI DCI/WAN for AI Traffic.”
AI workloads now span clusters scattered over a regional network. Power limits, scarce capacity, asymmetric topology, and tight latency make traffic engineering mandatory on the DCI/WAN—not optional. SRv6 is a natural fit: the same rich, mature SRv6 stack already deployed in SONiC AI DCs extends end-to-end from DC to DC through the interconnect, on DC-class hardware.
The session compares steering models—classify-and-steer at the aggregation node with no SRv6 on the host, versus host-selected SID lists—and walks through Alibaba’s ultra-scale AI DCI/WAN deployment in production, including dedicated eCores for AI scale-across, peering, finance, and public cloud on a unified SONiC + SRv6 pizza-box architecture.
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