GigaIO Networks has announced its Hydra product line, a fully managed PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 4.0 Pooling Appliance, a high-performance expansion chassis for the disaggregating and pooling of PCIe accelerator devices. This allows data centre operators to pool GPUs and FPGAs, and compose them at native PCIe latency for the increased data centre agility, performance and cost savings.
Using the off-the-shelf Ready-To-Run composition software of their choice, data centre managers can transform previously static resource silos into elastic, shareable resource pools, and liberate expensive stranded resources such as accelerators from the legacy servers.
The resulting software-defined infrastructure delivers cloud-like flexibility and agility while also reducing TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and delivering increased performance to their users.
GigaIO’s open standards approach to disaggregation and composability with Redfish APIs and off-the-shelf software delivers freedom from vendor lock-in, and removes a significant barrier to widespread adoption of composable infrastructure.
The GigaIO Accelerator Pooling Appliance provides up to 1Tb/sec bandwidth into and out of the box. It delivers advanced provisioning and monitoring of compute accelerators and next-gen NVMe assets, supporting up to 8 double-width PCIe 4.0 x16 accelerator cards and 4 PCIe 4.0 x16 low-profile cards. This flexible expansion platform enables users to add any PCIe 4.0 compliant application accelerators, GPUs (including the new NVIDIA A100), FPGAs, DPUs, IPUs, thin-NVMe-servers and speciality AI chips.
GigaIO’s advanced Redfish API interface provides management software that enables appliance provisioning as well as discovery, inventory, port configuration, diagnostics, monitoring, fault detection, utilisation auditing, and performance monitoring.
Administrators can provision devices, redeploy them and configure PCIe ports in seconds without service interruptions. Hydra also enables centralised analytics such as device utilisation and performance and provides a fault summary by continuously monitoring errors to quickly resolve problems and improve reliability.
‘Our customers require solutions that provide greater flexibility, performance and cost savings and once again GigaIO delivers’ says Niraj Mathur, vice president product management at GigaIO. ’Our leadership in delivering dynamically composable solutions for AI and HPC workloads in real-time, using industry-standard PCI Express technology, enable us to deliver solutions based on open industry standards.’
Hydra, available in Q1 2021, consists of two drawers each containing four double-width PCIe 4.0 slots each that are fully compatible with the latest high-end accelerators to create a next-generation HPC acceleration platform. The appliance also offers customisation options that allow customers to select cost-optimised connectivity performance based on their specific requirements.
