Wendell Wenjen, Director of Storage Development for Supermicro, and Paul McLeod, Product Storage Director from Supermicro, discuss challenges and solutions for AI and machine learning data storage highlighting how Solidigm SSDs help meet these challenges and provide solutions.
Supermicro provides servers, storage like the Solidigm D5-P5336, GPU-accelerated servers, and networking solutions, with AI-related applications as a significant portion of their revenue.
In this video, Wendell and Paul highlight the challenges in AI operations and machine learning operations, specifically around data management. This includes collecting data, transforming it, and feeding it into GPU clusters for training and inference. They also emphasize the need for large-capacity of storage to handle the various phases of the AI data pipeline.
Supermicro has a wide range of products that incorporate Solidigm SSDs, designed to cater to each stage of the AI data pipeline, from data ingestion, which requires a large data lake, to the training phase, which requires retaining large amounts of data for model development and validation.
They also discuss the importance of efficient data storage solutions and introduce the concept of an “IO Blender effect,” where multiple data pipelines run concurrently, creating a mix of different IO profiles.
Supermicro delves deeper into storage solutions, highlighting their partnership with WEKA, a software-defined storage company, and how their architecture is optimized for AI workloads. They explain the importance of NVMe flash storage, which can outpace processors, and the challenges of scaling such storage solutions. They also discuss Supermicro’s extensive portfolio of storage servers, ranging from multi-node systems to petascale architectures, designed to accommodate different customer needs.
Supermicro's approach to storage for AI includes a two-tiered solution with flash storage like the Solidigm D5-P5336 for high performance and hard drive-based storage for high capacity at a lower cost. They touch on the role of GPU direct storage in reducing latency and the flexibility of their software-defined storage solutions.
The presentation concludes with an overview of Supermicro's product offerings for different AI and machine learning workloads, from edge devices to large data center storage solutions. Watch the video to glean valuable insights about AI solutions, and how Supermicro, in partnership with companies like Solidigm and WEKA, is expanding the role of AI in the marketplace.
Read the transcript for Unlocking Your Data: Optimized Storage to Accelerate Your AI Data Pipeline.