ISC 2018: Kalray Unveiled Certified Intelligent NVME-oF Solutions With AIC

Kalray, Inc. has announced inline processing and artificial intelligence at the International SuperComputing trade show in Frankfurt, Germany from June 25 to June 27 with AIC, Inc., provider of both off-the-shelf and OEM/ODM server and storage solutions.

The company will be running two demonstrations: the Kalray Target Controller (KTC80) with inline mirroring to offload the network while securing the data; and the Kalray Neural Network (KaNN) performing live object recognition using artificial intelligence.

The KTC solution has been certified earlier this year by the NVM Express, Inc. organization through the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Laboratory (UNH-IOL), an independent testing provider of standard conformance solutions and multi-vendor interoperability. This certification is the first of its kind for an integrated system.

Randall Skelley, VP, data center business unit, Kalray, declared: “This is an important milestone for Kalray. We contribute to advancing NVMe technology and helping storage companies build intelligent systems for optimized data centers. The KTC80, which combines the Konic80 board, the intelligent MPPA processor and associated software, delivers a unique all-in-one system solution.“

Rex Chu, VP, sales, AIC Europe, added: “The NVMe-oF certification demonstrates the level of maturity of the Kalray solutions in the market. They address customers’ needs for systems that bring analytics and other computing capabilities closer to storage.“

Besides supporting the NVMe protocols, KTC offers extra resources in situ (i.e. more than 100 cores out of 288 of the company’s Bostan2 processor), providing customers with smarter storage solutions. In-situ computing also saves network bandwidth, running I/O intensive applications closer to the storage capacity. Such tasks as RAID/erasure coding, deduplication, compression, encryption or analytics, deep learning and AI algorithms can be offloaded from the storage server.

In addition, the firm provides the Kalray Neural Network (KaNN), a tool that allows customers to take advantage of the performance and flexibility offered by the MPPA’s architecture. This solution imports the trained models from usual frameworks (Caffe, TensorFlow, etc.) to ensure an optimal execution of AI algorithms such as GoogLeNet, ResNet, YOLO and others.

During ISC18, the company demonstrated real-time object detection and recognition, leveraging the performance of the KaNN tool.