Very cool. It requires a fully-connected mesh so the scaling limit here would seem to be 6 Mac Studio M3 Ultra, up to 3TB of unified memory to work with.
RDMA is a networking standard, it's supposed to be switched. The reason why it's being done over Thunderbolt is that it's the only cheap/prosumer I/O standard with enough bandwidth to make this work. Like, 100Gbit Ethernet cards are several hundred dollars minimum, for two ports, and you have to deal with SFP+ cabling. Thunderbolt is just way nicer[0].
The way this capability is exposed in the OS is that the computers negotiate an Ethernet bridge on top of the TB link. I suspect they're actually exposing PCIe Ethernet NICs to each other, but I'm not sure. But either way, a "Thunderbolt router" would just be a computer with a shitton of USB-C ports (in the same way that an "Ethernet router" is just a computer with a shitton of Ethernet ports). I suspect the biggest hurdle would actually just be sourcing an SoC with a lot of switching fabric but not a lot of compute. Like, you'd need Threadripper levels of connectivity but with like, one or two actual CPU cores.
[0] Like, last time I had to swap work laptops, I just plugged a TB cable between them and did an `rsync`.
The "R" in RDMA means there are multiple DMA controllers who can "transparently" share address spaces. You can certainly share address spaces across nodes with RoCE or Infiniband, but thats a layer on top
I don't know why that NVIDIA document is wrong, but the established term for doing DMA from eg. an NVMe SSD to a GPU within a single system without the CPU initiating the transfer is peer to peer DMA. RDMA is when your data leaves the local machine's PCIe fabric.
