- Solidigm’s New AI Lab Redefines What Dense SSD Storage Can Achieve
- The cluster offers record throughput, but questions remain about its true scalability.
- 23.6 petabytes compressed into 16U challenges the way storage is perceived
Solidigm has opened its AI Central Lab at the FarmGPU site near its headquarters in Rancho Cordova, California.
The facility is billed as a place to study how storage interacts with artificial intelligence workloads using high-performance GPUs and dense storage arrays.
The company says the lab provides one of the most compact large-scale clusters in the industry, intended to replicate conditions found in modern data centers.
Testing Record Performance Claims
At the heart of the announcement are Solidigm’s D7-PS1010 SSDs, which were used to achieve 116 GB/s per node in MLPerf storage tests.
This figure is described as a record result, although the value of such synthetic testing for real-world AI operations remains open to debate.
Benchmarks often highlight peak throughput, but actual workload performance can depend heavily on software and system integration.
The laboratory nevertheless provides a platform on which storage providers, developers and partners can conduct experiments under controlled but relevant conditions.
“Our Solidigm AI Central Lab combines today’s most powerful GPUs with cutting-edge storage infrastructure to unlock new levels of testing and joint innovation for our customers and the developer community,” said Avi Shetty, senior director, AI ecosystems and partnerships, Solidigm.
“These features were previously reserved for certain companies, and Solidigm now enables them while demonstrating the importance of having storage close to the GPU. »
Perhaps the most striking aspect is the claim of 23.6PB of storage in just 16U of rack space.
This was achieved using 192 Solidigm D5-P5336 SSDs, each with a capacity of 122 TB.
By volume, it may represent one of the densest publicly deployed enterprise storage clusters.
This raises questions about how this hardware compares to better hard drive options that continue to offer a lower cost per terabyte.
If performance requirements outweigh cost effectiveness, Solidigm’s setup could be seen as a step toward defining the largest SSD-based systems in production environments.
Solidigm has focused on working with partners such as Metrum AI, which claims to have reduced DRAM usage by 57% during recovery-augmented generation by transferring data to SSDs.
Such claims suggest potential benefits for memory management, but they also highlight the dependence of AI effectiveness on tightly coupled hardware and software tuning.
Even though the best SSD drives in the lab can demonstrate impressive speed and density, the market as a whole can weigh these gains against practical considerations such as power consumption, scalability, and long-term cost.
Solidigm’s AI Central Lab is positioned as a space for both innovation and marketing demonstration.
“Running storage tests is no longer enough. In our AI Central Lab, we can run real-world AI workloads and use our industry-leading telemetry capabilities to optimize system performance and efficiency and gain insight into the storage needs of emerging workloads,” Shetty said.
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