Originally published at: Supermicro Launches NVIDIA BlueField-Powered JBOF to Optimize AI Storage | NVIDIA Technical Blog
The growth of AI is driving exponential growth in computing power and a doubling of networking speeds every few years. Less well-known is that it’s also putting new demands on storage. Training new models typically requires high-bandwidth networked access to petabytes of data, while inference with the latest types of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) requires…
I’m puzzled by the inconsistency(?) between figure 1 and 3, where the PCI switch in fig1 is used by the x86 system while presumably the BF3 uses its internal PCI-switch, but in fig3 the x86 suddenly has no PCI-switch - just the CPU, and the BF3 solution unexpectedly needs a PLX. What am I missing?
I would also like to confirm that the GPU in each canister is optional for the JBoF functionality, since it is not accounted for in the fig1 or fig3 comparison (i’m assuming the x86 JBoF is normally without a GPU).
Having a slot for a GPU can naturally be useful, but if it is not required by the JBoF functionality itself, it is more of an added feature of the canister.