“Clean” computing infrastructure provider Crusoe Energy Systems is collaborating with VAST Data to offer Crusoe Cloud customers its new Shared Disks technology, which is a high-performance storage product for AI workloads.
This collaboration will deliver a petabyte scale file system capable of reads of up to 200 MBps per TiB per node.
According to Moody’s Ratings, datacenter electricity consumption is forecast to grow by 23 percent annually between 2023 and 2028, with AI-specific energy usage expected to grow by 43 percent annually over the same period.
In 2022, Crusoe, a solutions provider for the energy industry, launched Crusoe Cloud, a compute infrastructure platform for AI training, inference and HPC workloads. It is powered by 100 percent “clean, stranded or renewable energy”, achieved by co-locating datacenters with sources of clean energy, to lower the cost and mitigate the environmental impact of computing, says the firm. “Stranded” energy is methane being flared or excess production from clean and renewable sources.
Crusoe, which has dual headquarters in Denver and San Francisco and operates in seven countries, currently has around 200MW of total datacenter power capacity at its disposal, some owned by itself, and some at shared datacenter sites. It has plans to “rapidly expand” this capacity.
With the VAST Data Platform/VAST DataStore, Crusoe customers will have access to a NFS solution built for AI workloads at scale, said the partners. “For multi-GPU workloads like AI training, customers will be able to use Shared Disks to ensure they all have performant access to shared datasets,” they said.
“Crusoe chose VAST because of its exceptional ability to deliver the reliable file storage that our customers need without any depletion of performance as AI models are scaled,” said Patrick McGregor, Crusoe chief product officer. “With client data housed full-time through VAST’s platform, customers will be empowered to build and innovate entirely through Crusoe Cloud, as we advance our mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate.”
“Powered by the VAST Data Platform, Crusoe’s Shared Disks offering delivers the modern AI cloud infrastructure today’s enterprises need to address the challenges of scaling data-intensive AI workloads,” added Chris Morgan, vice president, solutions at VAST Data.”
With Shared Disks, customers will have the ability to create, resize, mount, unmount and delete shared disks using the Crusoe Cloud API, CLI, UI, or by using a Terraform infrastructure-as-code software tool.
Shared Disks can deliver up to 200 MBps of read throughput and 40 MBps of write throughput per TiB of storage provisioned. The Shared Disks are made available to a single project in an organization, with encryption at rest to deliver secure services to all customers at scale.
Through granular quality-of-service policies that prevent multi-tenant I/O contention, the disks deliver the performance and data access customers need for AI workloads from a single cluster, without being impacted by other tenants, we are told.
