Dell Technologies Inc. today announced two system families for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing workloads that use vSphere Bitfusion, a new graphic card virtualization technology VMware Inc. revealed this morning.

The systems are launching under the brands Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI and Dell EMC Ready Solutions for vHPC. Both are available immediately.

The Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI combine PowerEdge servers, Nvidia Corp. graphics cards, Isilon F800 all-flash file storage systems and networking gear. Companies can customize the components according to their needs. Dell is offering a choice of four Nvidia graphics processing units ranging from RTX workstation-grade cards to the more powerful V100 data center chip, as well as a selection of server and network switch models. 

Each system comes with VMware software to help companies manage the hardware components. Included in the bundle is vSphere 7, the latest version of VMware’s flagship virtualization platform, and VMware Cloud Foundation, which makes it possible to run AI workloads in containers using Kubernetes. Most notably, there’s also a new feature called vSphere Bitfusion that promises to help companies extract more value from the systems’ Nvidia chips by virtualizing them.

Bitfusion.io Inc. was an Austin-based startup that VMware acquired last year. It developed a software platform that increases the efficiency of companies’ AI infrastructure by reducing the amount of time GPUs sit idly without performing calculations. Bitfusion virtualizes those GPUs, allowing the computing power of a graphics card that’s not fully used by its host server to be used by other servers to increase utilization.

VMware has incorporated the startup’s technology into vSphere in the form of vSphere Bitfusion, the new feature announced this morning. The capability is available with vSphere Enterprise Plus licenses. 

“GPUs can now be used efficiently across the network and driven to the highest levels of utilization possible,” VMware product marketing group manager Michael Adams wrote in a blog post. “This means it allows for the sharing of GPUs in a similar fashion to the way vSphere allowed the sharing of CPUs many years ago. The result is an end to isolated islands of inefficiently used resources.”

Besides the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI, Dell will also ship the feature as part of its new Dell EMC Ready Solutions for vHPC. The latter systems can run machine learning workloads as well but have a somewhat different focus.

As the name implies, Dell EMC Ready Solutions for vHPC cater to high-performance computing workloads such such as scientific simulations that often run on supercomputers. These types of workloads also often make use AI. According to Dell, the fact that the systems come with vSphere 7 and Bitfusion makes them easier to manage than traditional HPC hardware because many information technology teams are already familiar with using vSphere to manage infrastructure.

Arthur Lewis, the president of Dell’s server and infrastructure systems division, providing more details about the systems in a blog post. “To optimize solution performance, engineering teams have created ready solutions for the two most common types of HPC workloads, Parallel Distributed Applications (MPI)  and Throughput Workloads,” Lewis wrote. “MPI applications are used in things like weather forecasting and molecular modeling. Throughput workloads can be seen in Monte Carlo simulations in financial risk analysis, digital movie rendering, and genomics analysis.”

Photo: Dell