3S-2400 AIl Flash Storage Server by PNY Enhances Nvidia DGX-1 for Deep Learning Projects

PNY Technologies, Inc. launched the 3S-2400 AI storage server.

It is a flash storage server dedicated to AI development, designed to maximise the performance of Nvidia Corp.‘s DGX-1 HPC.

AI has gone mainstream as organisations race to develop ML solutions for automation and innovation. However, the quantities of data needed to properly train these artificial neural networks is immense. Organisations need substantial processing power and storage capacity to bring their AI projects to fruition.

Using 8 GPUs, DGX-1 delivers 4x faster training speeds than other GPU-based systems, but it is not designed to store data. As organisations scale up their AI training projects, they will need to find supplementary storage solutions to avoid disruption and delays.

While addressing the needs of thie AI market, the company worked with Mark Klarzynski, a storage expert and a pioneer of the SDS movement and the all-flash array concept. While his technology is still is relied upon by many of the storage solutions, he embraced the firm’s vision of a more AI focused solution.

“Storage goes through cycles, we tend to incrementally improve existing technologies, increasing their speed and performance, but core limitations remain. There comes a point when the entire solution needs a reboot, a complete from the ground-up redesign. Working with PNY and the newer GPU servers, it was clear that today’s flash is simply faster than the traditional storage controller can deal with, and so it becomes an expensive bottleneck and removing this was the first step in a new gen of storage,” he commented. “AI does not need snapshot or deduplication or many of the features standard office focused storage require, it needs ultra-low latency and tremendous bandwidth at a price that does not impact the investment into GPU’s.”

“As the complexity of AI solutions increases, so will storage requirements,” said Jérôme Belan, CEO, PNY. “The PNY 3S-2400 server delivers this capacity, while also making it fast and easy to scale up your capacity as your dataset grows. It avoids costly delays and ensures AI projects don’t become bottlenecked.“

The Nvidia’s DGX-1 connects to the 3S-2400 server. 3S-2400’s RDMA technology allows the DGX-1’s GPUs to access the flash drives directly, ensuring low-latency performance and keeping the GPUs constantly supplied with data. The S-2400 server is enhanced by a layer of SDS provided by Excelero‘s NVMesh. It improves performance and offers users an interface where they can monitor drives and manage their volumes.

“By building upon Excelero’s NVMesh, we have created a solution that delivers the highest performance per rack unit in the market. Working with PNY’s customers clearly highlighted the benefit of Elastic NVMe, providing impressive improvements in training times,” said Lior Gal, CEO, Excelero. “By leveraging the latest gen of Intel hardware, we’re able to provide our customers with the performance and agility they need to succeed.“

The 3S-2400 server provides reliable storage and enhances performance for AI projects. It enables developers, data scientists and researchers to scale their AI projects, without the need for an expensive storage server. In addition, they can train their AI and DL models using the same data set stored on a single storage server. It is for professionals working for start-ups as well as established organisations beginning their own AI projects.

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November 21, 2019 | Press Release