Data volumes have been increasing for years – and researchers expect that will only increase in the coming years.
Edge computing, 5G-fueled hyperconnectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and other new technologies we’ve been hearing about for years are becoming not just more practical but more affordable.
For these and many other reasons, organizations and the technologists that support them are being forced to reimagine the datacenter that is still the heart of most data-reliant organizations. Modern datacenters need to be ready for what’s next, ideally without downtime or unplanned costs.
Because, the fact is, from academia to aerospace/defense to finance to life sciences, standing still means falling behind. You become less competitive in terms of innovation, mission execution, even attracting and retaining talent.
Fortunately, there is a solution many organizations can implement today that addresses many of these issues – building a datacenter that incorporates graphics processing unit (GPU)-acceleration of workloads.
It's well-known that GPUs can accelerate deep learning, machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. However, they can also improve performance of virtualization and data-heavy applications, two areas that impact many types of organizations.
Also, many exciting new technologies are being built on GPUs or explicitly need the acceleration GPUs provide. While AI is certainly an example of this, the same mathematical number crunching that make GPUs so valuable for the gaming industry can also accelerate the most demanding hyperscale and enterprise data center workloads.
And GPU-based infrastructure requires fewer servers but offers better performance. Consider, for example the 20x improvement of NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture over previous generations of GPUs (thanks to 54 billion transistors). The cost of GPUs has been dropping in recent years while the hardware infrastructure that can take advantage of them – both storage and compute – has been expanding. As a result, you can more accurately predict future performance capacity and, thus, the costs of potential workload expansion.
GPUs make for a very good parallel processing engine with high-speed memory with lots of bandwidth. They're often more efficient and require less floor space than central processing units (CPUs), which traditionally have served as the performance driver of datacenters. To make the case for GPU adoption even strong, GPU providers such as NVIDIA are pre-testing and bundling software necessary to workload execution.
Hardware infrastructure providers such as Thinkmate have spent the last several years ensuring clients of all kinds have access to the computing and storage technology they need to not just keep up but leapfrog competitors in the era of the GPU-enabled datacenter. Today, the options are greater than ever before.
You can get systems that generate massively parallel processing power and offer unrivaled networking flexibility. Choices include two double-width GPUs or up to 5 expansion slots in a 1U, for performance and quality that is optimized for the most computationally intensive applications. At the same time, thanks to GPU-experienced engineers, these unique designs come with Gold Level power supplies, energy-saving motherboards and enterprise class server management optimize cooling for even the most demanding applications.
By working with experienced infrastructure providers who can access to the latest technology and training to inform their system designs, organizations and their datacenter administrators can transform or augment existing datacenters to be more agile and performant without breaking the bank or shutting down the organization.
To learn more about GPU-accelerated datacenters, watch this webinar from Thinkmate and PNY via this registration page. In it, we dive into the future of the datacenter and why the GPU is critical, the technology behind GPU acceleration, and what sort of options exist for different industries or types of organizations.
Then visit our GPU-accelerated servers page to find the right solution for your datacenter.