The headline story in this week’s storage digest is concerns NGD’s computational storage drives reducing deep neural net training time by up to two thirds. That’s a new use for such drives.
NGD Computational Storage and Deep Neural Nets
A scientific paper, HyperTune: Dynamic Hyperparameter Tuning For Efficient Distribution of DNN Training Over Heterogeneous Systems, shows that NGD’s computational storage drive (CSD) SSDs shorten distributed training time.
DNNs are deep neural nets and it can take days or weeks to train a neural network to an acceptable accuracy level. Distributing the training across a GPU cluster shortens this time but at the expense of much greater electricity usage.
Using CSDs means all the training procedures can be done on these drives, reducing data movement. Only the final parameters, significantly smaller in size than the raw input data, are shared with other nodes.
The paper cites the use of Stannis, a DNN training framework that works better than existing distributed training frameworks by dynamically tuning the training hyperparameters in heterogeneous systems to maintain the maximum overall processing speed in term of processed images per second and energy efficiency.
Experimental results on image classification training benchmarks show up to 3.1x improvement in performance and 2.45x reduction in energy consumption when using Stannis plus NGD drives compared to the generic systems.
Shorts
Italian cloud provider Aruba has introduced a managed Database as a Service (DBaaS) which increases the computational resources available as a database grows. It features transparent costs with breakdown of spending, which can be monitored at any time. Aruba DBaaS is available in two plans, both billed monthly: shared DBaaS, for “non mission critical” applications; and dedicated DBaaS, for production environments with guaranteed computational resources. Both plans include one public IP address, seven daily backups and optional backups on demand.
DDN has launched its certified DDN and NVIDIA joint offering for AI integration use cases, consisting of pre-integrated configurations of DDN’s A3I (Accelerated, Any-Scale AI) system and NVIDIA’s DGX A100 systems. This is sold through distributor Arrow Electronics.
HPE has added a Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for SimpliVity HCI systems. Users can provision SimpliVity storage to Kubernetes containers by creating and using the persistent storage on the same datastore used by their virtual machines. The plugin uses an internal REST API to create and restore persistent volume snapshots in a SimpliVity datastore. It enables users perform static and dynamic provisioning, create volume snapshots, and perform a number of other HPE SimpliVity operations.
At its 18th Global Analyst Summit last week, Huawei announced several changes to boost business resilience, optimise its portfolio in software capabilities and components for intelligent vehicles, and focus on developments to address energy consumption and supply chain challenges. William Xu, head of Huawei’s Institute of Strategic Research, discussed moving beyond von Neumann architecture to build 100x denser storage systems.
Kioxia announced its CM6 SSDs, which have a PCIe 4.0 NVMe interface, are certified by Nvidia for use with its Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage. GPUDirect enables stored data to move directly from an SSD in a host system to an Nvidia GPU server without having to be moved to the host system’s memory by a system software IO stack running in the host’s CPU. This CPU-bypass technology greatly increases data transfer speed to Nvidia’s GPUs.
Pure Storage last week said its annual subscription services revenue, which includes Pure as-a-Service and Evergreen and makes up more than 30 per cent of total revenues, exceeded $500m in FY21, representing 33 per cent Y/Y growth.
Robin.io, which builds its Cloud Native Storage (CNS) software to provision storage to Kubernetes-orchestrated containers, says its CNS product is now available on a pay-as-you-go basis in the Red Hat Marketplace. Payment is for hourly periods and the product runs on Red Hat OpenShift..
Chinese supplier TerraMaster has announced its D5-300 5-bay RAID storage designed for professionals working in small office/home office (SOHO) setups. It comes with up to 90TB of capacity and USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-C capable of reaching speeds of up to 220MB/sec. It’s priced at $269.99.
Wasabi Cloud Storage has announced the launch of its new centralised management system for channel partners, Account Control Manager. They can now automate cloud storage account creation, management and user billing and get increased administrative simplicity, reduced time-to-market for new cloud storage offerings, and new data-driven utilisation insights to make better capacity decisions.
