- New Solidigm AI Lab Redefines High-Density SSD Capabilities
- The cluster provides record throughput, but questions remain about true scalability.
- 23.6 petabytes in a 16U chassis challenges storage perceptions
Solidigm has opened a central AI lab at FarmGPU near its headquarters in Rancho Cordova, California.
The facility is presented as a place to study how storage interacts with artificial intelligence workloads using high-performance GPUs and dense storage arrays.
Company speaks The lab provides one of the industry's most compact, large-scale clusters designed to emulate the environment of today's data centers.
Testing claims of record performance
The ad is based on Solid State Drives Solidigm D7-PS1010which were used to achieve 116 GB/s per node in MLPerf Storage tests.
This figure is described as a record result, although the value of such synthetic testing for real-world AI operations remains open to debate.
Performance tests often indicate peak throughput, but actual workload performance can be highly dependent on software and system integration.
However, the lab offers a platform on which storage vendors, developers and partners can conduct experiments under controlled but compliant conditions.
“Our Solidigm AI Central Lab combines today's most powerful GPUs with leading storage infrastructure to unlock new levels of testing and collaborative innovation for our customers and developer community,” said Avi Shetty, senior director of AI ecosystems and partnerships at Solidigm.
“These capabilities were previously only available to select companies, but now Solidigm delivers them while demonstrating the importance of having storage close to the GPU.”
Perhaps the most attractive aspect is the claim of 23.6 PB of storage, housed in a rack that's only 16U tall.
This was achieved using 192 Solid State Drives Solidigm D5-P5336each with a capacity of 122 TB.
In terms of volume, this may represent one of the densest enterprise storage clusters deployed publicly.
This raises questions about how such equipment compares with best hard drive options that still offer a lower cost per terabyte.
If performance requirements outweigh cost effectiveness, installing Solidigm can be seen as a step towards defining largest SSDbased systems in production environments.
Solidigm highlighted the importance of collaborating with partners such as Metrum AI, which claims to have reduced DRAM usage during advanced search generation by as much as 57% by offloading data to SSDs.
Such statements suggest potential benefits for memory management, although they also highlight the dependence of AI performance on tightly coupled hardware and software tuning.
While best SSD While devices in the lab can exhibit impressive speeds and densities, the broader market can weigh these benefits against practical considerations such as power consumption, scalability, and long-term costs.
Solidigm's AI Central Lab positions itself as a space for innovation and marketing demos.
“Running storage tests is no longer enough. In our central AI lab, we can run real AI workloads and use our advanced telemetry capabilities to optimize systems for performance and efficiency, and gain insight into the storage needs of new workloads,” Shetty said.
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