Fusion HCI Adds 8x the GPU Power

IBM Storage Fusion HCI System has released a new GPU server today that takes a huge step forward in the support of AI applications.  The new server, called the G03, can be configured to have as many as 8 double-wide GPU adapter cards.  Fine-tuning and inferencing with foundation models used in AI applications increasingly requires faster and more powerful hardware, and the Fusion HCI G03 meets that need head on!

The tremendous boost provided by the G03 for AI apps comes from having up to 8 of the NVIDIA L40S GPU PCIe double-wide adapter cards inside a single server.  The L40S is powered by the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace Architecture and is designed for generative AI and LLM training and inferencing.  It contains fourth generation tensor cores and the latest transformer engine that puts those tensor cores to good use.

The design of the G03 provides flexibility for deploying GPU resources.  Many organizations will order the G03 with a full complement of 8 L40S GPUs.  But for organizations getting started with AI applications, the G03 can be ordered with just a single L40S GPU.  The the G03 can later be upgraded by adding more L40S GPUs as needs increase until the maximum of 8 is reached.  And if one G03 GPU server isn't enough, then a second server can be added to double the available GPU resources!

The G03 GPU server is based on the Lenovo SR675 V3 and includes a pair of AMD EPYC 4 9254 24-core "Genoa" processors.  It supports PCIe Gen 5 and so the G03 is well positioned to exploit the latest PCIe GPU adapter cards as they become available.

In addition to the significant GPU and CPU resources, there is 768GB of RAM configured as 24x 32GB DIMMs.  That works out to be one DIMM in each of the 24 memory channels for maximum memory performance.  The CoreOS operating system used by Red Hat OpenShift is installed on two 960GB M.2 NVMe OS drives in a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy.  Like every other server in a Fusion HCI rack, the G03 server has redundant network connections to the OpenShift application network. These are provided by an NVIDIA ConnectX-6 LX dual-port 25GbE PCIe NIC. And the G03 also has redundant connections to the high-speed storage network using an NVIDIA ConnectX-6 DX dual-port 100GbE PCIe NIC.

Designed to give a huge boost the performance of AI applications with powerful GPU technology, the new Fusion HCI G03 GPU server is the ideal scalable option to add to an IBM Storage Fusion HCI System!

To learn more about how Fusion HCI uses its GPU resources like the G03 in support of AI workloads, check out this page: https://ibm.github.io/storage-fusion/watsonx/overview

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