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VMWARE EMBRACES NVIDIA GPUS, DPUS TO DRIVE ENTERPRISE AI
September 30, 2020
September 30, 2020
https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/09/30/vmware-embraces-nvidia-gpus-to-drive-enterprise-ai/VMware chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger says organizations want AI for such tasks as video analytics and real-time streaming for fraud detection, but added that “as exciting as these next-generation apps are, they’re beyond the reach for mainstream organizations. In fact, enterprise AI adoption is stuck at just 10 to 15 percent.”
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Integrating the Nvidia NGC suite into its key hybrid cloud offerings represents a change for VMware. The company in its journey from datacenter virtualization pioneer to hybrid cloud solutions provider has been primarily X86 CPU-focused. However, GPUs – which started off as graphics chips for devices and under Nvidia’s relentless drive have become key accelerators in the datacenter – are becoming foundational tools for AI and other emerging workloads.
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The key shift in the architecture is from basing it on core CPUs to SmartNICs, based on Nvidia’s Mellanox BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU). With Project Monterey, VMware can run its ESXi hypervisor, a move that required porting ESXi to the Arm architecture. Nvidia’s SmartNICs are based on the Arm architecture, which isn’t surprising given Nvidia’s past use of the architecture and the fact that Nvidia is now in the process of buying Arm for $40 billion. In the new architecture, there are two ESXi instances for each physical server – one on the primarily x86 processors and the other on the SmartNIC – and they can run separately or together in a single logical instance. Storage and network services also run on the SmartNIC, which improve the performance of both while reducing pressure on the CPU. The SmartNIC ESXi will manage the x86 ESXi.
The new highly disaggregated architecture also exposes the hardware accelerators – like GPUs and FPGAs – to all hosts in a any cluster to allow applications in the cluster to leverage the accelerators both ESXi and bare-metal environments.
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Nvidia developed the BlueField-2 DPU for Project Monterey, Huang said, adding that it’s “built on the Mellanox state-of-the-art, well-known high performance NICs. The BlueField DPU Is going to essentially take the operating system of the datacenter — networking, storage, security, virtualization functionality — and offload it onto this new processor. This new processor is going to be essentially the datacenter infrastructure on a chip. Datacenters are going to be much more performant result of this.”
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This leads us into an era of disaggregation where, rather than deploy intact systems, we aim to deploy smaller, malleable building blocks that are disaggregated across a fabric and must be composed to realize the intent of the user or application. The provisioning of engines to drive workloads is completely API-driven and can be specified as part of the Kubernetes manifest if using VCF with Tanzu. We call this intent-based computing.”
Vendors like Dell and HPE have been talking about composability for the past several years, but the concept can be seen in mainframes and old Unix-based systems. With x86 systems, there has been “coarse-grained” composability with technologies like VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), which created software-defined infrastructure out of intact servers or storage systems. Project Monterey will deliver more fine-grained composability, including extending disaggregation to the hypervisor by making most of the general-purpose compute available via the SmartNICs, he wrote.