Innovation isn’t a sprint; it’s a relay where partnerships dictate the pace. At Supercomputing 2024, three industry giants — Nvidia Corp., Super Micro Computer Inc. and WekaIO Inc. — unveiled a collaboration aimed at redefining high-performance computing and AI data centers.

Weka, Supermicro and Nvidia discuss insights on the AI data center with theCUBE.

“As we continue to see the build-out [of AI data centers], two challenges are happening,” said Nilesh Patel (pictured, second from left), chief product officer of Weka. “One is the power consumption and the power requirement in data centers is growing like crazy. The second thing is now we are getting into influencing space where it’s becoming a token economy. The cost token for dollars, tokens per wattage use and so on … have become our important KPIs. We got together with Nvidia and Supermicro and tried to attack one of the core problems that is becoming the Achilles heel for data center growth, particularly for AI infrastructure.”

Patel, alongside Patrick Chiu (left), senior director of storage product management at Supermicro, and Ian Finder (right), group product manager of accelerated computing at Nvidia, spoke with theCUBE Research’s Savannah Peterson at SC24, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how all three companies are joining forces to tackle key challenges, such as power efficiency, scalability and sustainability, paving the way for a new era in AI-driven infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Redefining storage for AI data centers

Nvidia’s Grace ARM-based CPUs take center stage in this partnership, marking a milestone in the evolution of storage solutions. Known for its high-performance storage software, Weka integrated the Grace CPU into its platform to deliver unprecedented throughput and memory bandwidth. The result is a 2X improvement in power efficiency, coupled with the ability to handle the most demanding AI and HPC workloads, according to Finder.

“Everyone at this conference is obsessed with the idea of balance from a system design and platform design level,” he said. “It’s the balance that causes you to need high-throughput storage to saturate your compute environments. Once you look into the box with Grace, we’ve architected a chip that has a tremendous amount of memory bandwidth. We have 512 gigabytes a second of memory bandwidth per socket in Grace, so the Weka machine has a terabyte-per-second of memory bandwidth in aggregate in that storage appliance.”

Power consumption is a growing concern as AI infrastructures scale. Supermicro, the hardware powerhouse in this collaboration, highlighted how the new storage solution reduces power usage while maintaining high performance, according to Chiu.

“You can convert this hardware advantage to the whole rack and whole data center,” he said. “We are so excited that we can be the partner and launch these new systems. We believe there will be a revolution for the new AI data centers and HPC data centers.”

Supermicro’s 1U system has been robustly equipped with the latest SSD and PCIe Gen 5 technologies and achieves nearly one petabyte of storage capacity. Combined with Weka’s software, this system delivers four to 10 times better power density compared to traditional solutions, Chiu added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of SC24: 

(* Disclosure: WekaIO Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Weka nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE