7PB of DDN AI400X All-Flash Storage Supports NVIDIA’s Selene in Becoming the Largest Industrial Supercomputer in the United States
DDN, premier provider of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Management software and hardware solutions enabling Intelligent Infrastructure, announced that its data infrastructure is used in the NVIDIA supercomputer that achieved the 7th position in the most recently announced TOP500 supercomputing list revealed last week during ISC High Performance 2020 Digital conference. DDN AI400X all-flash systems complement the fast deployment and high-performance capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster, dubbed Selene.
“Over the last few years, we have worked to optimize our solutions for NVIDIA DGX systems and maximize data acceleration to complement the massive computing capabilities of NVIDIA GPUs,” said James Coomer, senior vice president of products, DDN. “We’re proud DDN was selected as the storage system to back the powerful NVIDIA Selene supercomputer.”
The DDN AI400X is part of the company’s lineup of AI and analytics data solutions for enterprise customers. Simplifying the HPC user experience, DDN has streamlined deployment, management and growth for data-intensive workloads. This allows customers with emerging AI projects to move seamlessly from POC to large-capacity production. By deploying DDN A3I products alongside NVIDIA’s DGX A100 system, customers can ensure that they maximize the capabilities of their GPU-accelerated workloads across a wide variety of markets — from financial services, to life sciences and autonomous driving applications.
“NVIDIA built Selene to demonstrate the power of the DGX SuperPOD reference architecture for organizations that need to scale AI infrastructure with greater speed and energy efficiency than traditional supercomputing clusters that take months to design, install and operationalize,” said Charlie Boyle, Vice President and General Manager of DGX systems, NVIDIA. “In combination with DGX SuperPOD implementations like Selene, DDN AI400X helps organizations build systemized leadership-class infrastructure with the high-performance storage needed to support the world’s most challenging AI and HPC workloads.”
DDN’s A3I systems are all-flash and hybrid storage appliances designed to handle the performance and capacity needs for all data-intensive workloads. The hardware is designed to maximize the efficiency from end to end with components that include NVIDIA Mellanox Quantum 200G InfiniBand switches that deliver the high-performance network fabric employed within the Selene infrastructure. DDN takes the further step of optimizing the data path to the GPUs in order to drive a system that can achieve 20x greater performance for analytics workloads.