Intelligent Data Movement and Data Placement dictate the future of AI Data Infrastructure

I have been reading a couple of articles over the weekend which started by placing the weights of outdated networking infrastructure slowing down AI ambitions. The 2 articles are:

I did not fully agree that networking infrastructure is the main inhibitor of AI ambitions per se. Not from the experiences and the present development in high performance networking of what I know so far. In fact, AI networking infrastructure has been growing leaps and bounds, laying down ultra-high throughput plumbing between the GPUs (inadvertently up the stack to the AI models and applications) and the data storage infrastructure.

The NVIDIA-heavy GPU compute infrastructure is of course, dominated by its own NVIDIA’s networking infrastructure. Both NVIDIA Spectrum (Ethernet) and Quantum (InfiniBand), BlueField (data processing units), ConnectX and LinkX are the mainstays of DGX Cloud, a big part of NVIDIA NCPs as well.

In fact, in one of DDN’s NCP customers, I have seen a 10-node DDN EXAscaler cluster deliver almost 1.1TB/sec read and 750GB/sec write throughput to the GPU compute cluster, out-of-the-box, all with 200Gbps networking gear.

Continue reading

Memory cloud reality soon?

The original SAN was not always Storage Area Network. SAN had a twin nomenclature called System Area Network (SAN) back in the late 90s. Fibre Channel fabric topology (THE Storage Area Network) was only starting to take off when many of the Fibre Channel topologies at the time were either FC-AL (Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop) or Point-to-Point. So, for a while SAN was System Area Network, or at least that was what Microsoft® wanted it to be. That SAN obviously did not take off.

System Area Network (architecture shown below) presented a high speed network where server clusters can communicate. The communication protocol of choice was VIA (Virtual Interface Adapter), and the proposed applications, notably the Microsoft® SQL Server, would use Winsock API to interface with the network services. Cache coherency in the combined memory resources of a clustered network is often the technology to ensure data synchronization, consistency and integrity.

Alas, System Area Network did not truly take off, and now it is pretty much deprecated from the Microsoft® universe.

System Area Network (SAN)

Continue reading

Connecting ideas and people with Dell Influencers

[Disclosure: I was invited by Dell Technologies as a delegate to their Dell Technologies World 2019 Conference from Apr 29-May 1, 2019 in the Las Vegas USA. My expenses, travel, accommodation and conference fees were covered by Dell Technologies, the organizer and I was not obligated to blog or promote their technologies presented at this event. The content of this blog is of my own opinions and views]

I just got home from Vegas yesterday after attending my 2nd Dell Technologies World as one of the Dell Luminaries. The conference was definitely a bigger one than the one last year, with more than 15,000 attendees. And there was a frenzy of announcements, from Dell Technologies Cloud to new infrastructure solutions, and more. The big one for me, obviously was Azure VMware Solutions officiated by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, with Michael Dell bringing together the union. I blogged about Dell jumping into the cloud in a big way.

AI Tweetup

In the razzmatazz, the most memorable moments were one of the Tweetups organized by Dr. Konstanze Alex (Konnie) and her team, and Tech Field Day Extra.

Tweetup was alien to me. I didn’t know how the concept work and I did google tweetup before that. There were a few tweetups on the topics of data protection and 5G, but the one that stood out for me was the AI tweetup.

No alt text provided for this image

Continue reading