no, ICI is a fiber optic (or electrical) network between TPUs and it doesn't have any switch functionality. I used to work for Google (on TPUs and ICI). Anyway, the comparisons don't matter that much. The long and short of it is that Google built their own supercomputers (finally) that can do allreduce and alltoall patterns, as well as low-latency broadcast.

Do you have a point? There's nothing technically wrong with saying that TPUs with ICI are a supercomputer- they are very similar in design to the T3E I used decades ago.

Please make your point instead of trying to negate whatt I said.

Medium matters a lot- because supercomputers are fundamentally constrained by physics in terms of power dissipation, transistor density, and speed of light, all-optical networks have slightly lower latencies than electrical, and also let you build larger systems (longer cables).