Stefan Mileschin

Enterprise AI beats the X86 competition

IBM has just announced an AC922 Power 9 based machine that addresses artificial intelligence (AI), deep and machine learning - aimed at the enterprise AI market.

The new AC922 server has four to six V100 GPUs with 16 or 32GB and comes with a new Power 9 processor, supports PCIe Gen 4 and the second generation NVlink 2.0 interlink unique to IBM’s platform. The system is targeting the memory coherence as the I/O system gets you to use the 2TB of system RAM almost as fast as the access time of the GPU RAM.

IBM’s four GPU system enables an incredible CPU to GPU bandwidth of 150 GB/s/ CPU to DDR4 memory can only achieve 170 GB/s, so NVlink 2.0 is actually very close to that speed. NVlink 2.0 lets two V100 cards talk to the same 150 GB/s. This is the unique ability of the IBM Power 9 platform.
2TB plus Hash tables data sets

This gives great coherent access to system memory. The whole system address 2TB and this should be enough for very large hash tables. Of course, the system comes with PCIe Gen 4 CAPI 2.0 support. The CAPI 2.0 - unique to the Power 9 processor - enables 32GB /s speeds. CAPI 2.0 Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface is designed as a layer on top of the PCIe that enables direct connection of the CPUI and external accelerations like GPU, ASIC, FPGA or fast storage.

The AC922 accelerated server machine also supports an open source variant of CAPI. OpenCAPI is an Open Standard-based High-speed interconnect for accelerators, storage-class memory, and networking.

The key advantage over the X86 competition - read Intel) -is the memory coherency as you can directly attach the GPU to the system memory. IBM’s advantage is that it can interconnect the GPU to system memory much faster than Intel based machines. The four GPU machine is equipped with InfiniBand and Ethernet and comes as an air-cooled solution.

https://fudzilla.com/news/ai/46244-i...-6-nvidia-v100