According to IBM’s gospel of AI “we are in the midst of a global transformation and it is touching every aspect of our world, our lives, and our businesses.” IBM has been preaching its gospel of AI of the past year or longer, but most of its clients haven’t jumped fully aboard. “For most of our clients, AI will be a journey. This is demonstrated by the fact that most organizations are still in the early phases of AI adoption.”
AC922 with NIVIDIA Tesla V100 and Enhanced NVLink GPUs
The company’s latest announcements earlier this week focus POWER9 squarely on AI. Said Tim Burke, Engineering Vice President, Cloud and Operating System Infrastructure, at Red Hat. “POWER9-based servers, running Red Hat’s leading open technologies offer a more stable and performance optimized foundation for machine learning and AI frameworks, which is required for production deployments… including PowerAI, IBM’s software platform for deep learning with IBM Power Systems that includes popular frameworks like Tensorflow and Caffe, as the first commercially supported AI software offering for [the Red Hat] platform.”
IBM insists this is not just about POWER9 and they may have a point; GPUs and other assist processors are taking on more importance as companies try to emulate the hyperscalers in their efforts to drive server efficiency while boosting power in the wake of declines in Moore’s Law. ”GPUs are at the foundation of major advances in AI and deep learning around the world,” said Paresh Kharya, group product marketing manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. [Through] “the tight integration of IBM POWER9 processors and NVIDIA V100 GPUs made possible by NVIDIA NVLink, enterprises can experience incredible increases in performance for compute- intensive workloads.”
To create an AI-optimized infrastructure, IBM announced the latest additions to its POWER9 lineup, the IBM Power Systems LC922 and LC921. Characterized by IBM as balanced servers offering both compute capabilities and up to 120 terabytes of data storage and NVMe for rapid access to vast amounts of data. IBM included HDD in the announcement but any serious AI workload will choke without ample SSD.
Specifically, these new servers bring an updated version of the AC922 server, which now features recently announced 32GB NVIDIA V100 GPUs and larger system memory, which enables bigger deep learning models to improve the accuracy of AI workloads.
IBM has characterized the new models as data-intensive machines and AI-intensive systems, LC922 and LC921 Servers with POWER9 processors. The AC922, arrived last fall. It was designed for the what IBM calls the post-CPU era. The AC922 was the first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation NVIDIA NVLink, and OpenCAPI—3 interface accelerators—which together can accelerate data movement 9.5x faster than PCIe 3.0 based x86 systems. The AC922 was designed to drive demonstrable performance improvements across popular AI frameworks such as TensorFlow and Caffe.
In the post CPU era, where Moore’s Law no longer rules, you need to pay as much attention to the GPU and other assist processors as the CPU itself, maybe even more so. For example, the coherence and high-speed of the NVLink enables hash tables—critical for fast analytics—on GPUs. As IBM noted at the introduction of the new machines this week: Hash tables are fundamental data structure for analytics over large datasets. For this you need large memory: small GPU memory limits hash table size and analytic performance. The CPU-GPU NVLink2 solves 2 key problems: large memory and high-speed enables storing the full hash table in CPU memory and transferring pieces to GPU for fast operations; coherence enables new inserts in CPU memory to get updated in GPU memory. Otherwise, modifications on data in CPU memory do not get updated in GPU memory.
IBM has started referring to the LC922 and LC921 as big data crushers. The LC921 brings 2 POWER9 sockets in a 1U form factor; for I/O it comes with both PCIe 4.0 and CAPI 2.0.; and offers up to 40 cores (160 threads) and 2TB RAM, which is ideal for environments requiring dense computing.
The LC922 is considerably bigger. It offers balanced compute capabilities delivered with the P9 processor and up to 120TB of storage capacity, again advanced I/O through PCIe 4.0/CAPI 2.0, and up to 44 cores (176 threads) and 2TB RAM. The list price, notes IBM is ~30% less.
If your organization is not thinking about AI your organization is probably in the minority, according to IDC.
- 31 percent of organizations are in [AI] discovery/evaluation
- 22 percent of organizations plan to implement AI in next 1-2 years
- 22 percent of organizations are running AI trials
- 4 percent of organizations have already deployed AI
Underpinning both servers is the IBM POWER9 CPU. The POWER9 enjoys a nearly 5.6x improved CPU to GPU bandwidth vs x86, which can improve deep learning training times by nearly 4x. Even today companies are struggling to cobble together the different pieces and make them work. IBM learned that lesson and now offers a unified AI infrastructure in PowerAI and Power9 that you can use today.
DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.
Tags: analytics, Big Data, Caffe, CAPI 2.0, Cloud, cognitive computing, IBM, Java, Linux, LinuxONE, NVIDIA NVLink, PCIe 4.0, Power LC921, Power LC922, Power Systems, POWER9, PowerAI, TensorFlow
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