Seagate Member of Innovations for Digital Infrastructure

Seagate Technology plc is the newest member of the Innovations for Digital Infrastructure (I4DI), a partnership of technology leaders that are developing European-based supercomputing solutions to advance the region’s capabilities in solving the performance, power and efficiency issues challenging the industry.

It joins founding members PosAm s.r.o., Towercom Ltd and Tachyum, Inc., and thus the partnership with SAV (Slovak Academy of Sciences) and MIRRI SR (Ministry of Investment, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic) within National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC).

I4DI provides freedom and openness similar to Open Compute to the European HPC market. The consortium brings together companies in storage, networking, rack manufacturing, power, software, services and telecommunications spaces to help transform the entire EU region from an importer of data center and HPC technologies to an innovative leader in research for WW AI and HPC solutions. Seagate brings to the I4DI its 40+ years of experience in helping overcome data growth with its HDDs, SSDs, systems and recovery services.

“We recognize the importance of working with fellow technology companies to develop solutions that better both the industry as a whole and our standing within it,” said Mohamad El-Batal, chief technologist and a member of the Seagate CTO office. “Joining the I4DI provides us with the opportunity to expand innovation that addresses the specific needs of the EMEA region while advancing technologies that can then be deployed to a worldwide marketplace. We look forward to the I4DI being a fruitful endeavor for all involved.“

The EU consumes 30% of the world’s supercomputing resources but has only 5% of the world, capacity based on a recent EU report. This discrepancy has led the EU Commission to set out to determine its own destiny by building its own HPCs and data centers, with improved efficiency and resource utilization to combat vs. increased carbon emissions and warming associated with traditional compute infrastructures.

I4DI-designed data centers will serve as a blueprint for future government or commercial cloud initiatives such as InoCloud. Because of dual use, both commercially and for government/AI workload, new I4DI datacenters will be more efficient, enabling hardware utilization rates to improve to more than 90% vs. their current 40% utilization rates.

For example, NSCC (National Supercomputing Centre) is expected to operate one of the world’s fastest AI HPCs to solve the data and technological sovereignty challenges of the EU. This Slovak national computing center will showcase the first universal processor Prodigy from Tachyum, which can switch among hyperscale, AI and HPC workloads. Its performance, efficiency and cost is expected to garner international attention while accelerating migration of Prodigy-based solutions to public and private cloud infrastructures.

“We are pleased to have multi-billion dollar industry heavyweight Seagate throw its considerable capabilities and resources into the I4DI initiative as we look to continue building the EU’s status as a technology center of excellence,” said Dr. Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “Places like Slovakia specifically and the European continent in general have the human capital and capabilities needed to drive the technology industry and with the backing of the I4DI, we will be able to develop, foster and grow these capabilities to improve the performance for cutting-edge data center, AI and HPC workloads.“