Serban Zirnovan, Dell Technologies & Guy D'Hauwers, atNorth | SC23
good morning nerds and welcome back to the mile high city we're here at Super Computing 2023 my name is Savannah Peterson joined by my co-host John ferer John day two lots of action lots of people Milling around how you feeling I mean feeling great and the conversations about Hardware speeds and feeds which we love because the silicon and the cloud bringing things together more servers more cores more networking I mean it's a store of innovation here it's going to be awesome and data is driving Ai and that's all this is kind of collision together it's great it is great and I'm particularly excited for our next conversation about sustainable business in HPC and AI Hot Topic here at the show pretty much covering all the bases please welcome sbon and G thank you both so much for being here are you having a good show it sounds like you're both busy oh plenty of meetings a lot of customers discussion a lot of Partners and uh obviously we are looking to develop further what the what the business is for the HBC and which is the conversation top of mind for everyone here I suspect most of our audience is familiar with Dell however sban why don't you give us a little bit of background on at North so at North is a pordic uh service provider we building data centers for HBC ni only uh from from the ground up uh we built HBC as service and AI as a service so we are really uh partners in crime for really developing this business and supporting this business but in a very sustainable way coming from the nordics I'm not surprised to hear you say that you have multiple dat data centers across the nordx G correct you're just about to open your ninth in Copenhagen is that correct that's right that is exciting congratulations on that tell me tell me a little bit more about the partnership you mentioned that you've been working together sabron for five plus years almost five years yeah yeah yeah so so you're not hype curve Chasers you've been planning for this moment we plan for quite a long time this type of thinking um the way how it started was like we were looking for a partner able to provide a sustainable um and a clear understandable energy cost and um able to provide a a solution which is related to an which is stable as well not only from an economic perspective but also from a political perspective into this world today well um I I think this is what it was a very important way to look into this one and um when we start the business we were looking to um how we can merge um a d culture which is around technology and people and and processes and and Partnerships together with what what the customers are looking for and Ator was exactly in the middle of uh of that of that Turning Point G talk about the the um formula for Success cuz it's very difficult to have the sustainability check box legitimately and have Technology Innovation Technology Innovation and the workload scalability and density that's required in the high performance data centers what's the secret sauce what's the formula how do you guys pull it off so first of all we as we focus on HB C and we're focusing on what other workloads our customers are running because that's that's what why they do this and then we see really see how how what do we need to make this better to make this more performant to make this more uh agile and we we looked at what is needed underneath what is the best configuration of the hardware what is the best network the best storage the best but we we have looked at at scale because we look at customers at scale uh yesterday we were in the present presentation where the boing was was presented how they do development of planes now and for the future so this is really at scale so no no doubt we have done this together for clients that we can mention that we can uh that we can really refer to it's a bank BMP pariba we looked at what they what they are running they do all their uh risk calculations which are really heavy they mooved them away from France from from uh from UK from Central Europe and we built that together for them in several data centers in Nordic in Iceland in Sweden and so on we built that for them in a redundant way and they are now enjoying this and this is now their sustainability story they show on their website they show in their annual report how they achieve sustainability and guy is super important to mention here that it was not a one side only work it was it was all the parties the um uh the customer which was looking to organize this one us as a vendor G as a partner to assemble all these discussions and to build a solution and by the way one of the cities in in Copenhagen is is using um the the hot water in order to uh produce uh heat for the for the people into into the city so it's a kind of a circular you got the renewability exactly what's the design factor I can only imagine the design has to be Innovative yes and you got to use Dell gear you got to get the stuff you got to get the hardware what's the design Mission North what's the North Star on the design philosophy yeah happy to really go into that not too long but to the point so as we said we we covered the whole stock from the application we look what the application needs and what are what are the data center needs the network needs the compute needs the storage needs and so on and what we did is because our clients they want sustainability now much more than before a couple of years ago sustainability was on their list but not not at the top not not necessarily at the top three even it was mentioned but now it is absolutely at the top three so what we did we did the design so we see of course the computers the data centers so the data Cent Only Knew use uh the most efficient way of energy and we have an abundance of renewable energy in the nordics so that's stick in the box then with the data data center design is the most efficient we build it for HPC Andi in the in the most efficient way taking the box then of course we look how how the whole clusters come together and we now move more and more into uh direct liquid cooling so we actually directly capture the heat get that to the to the Heat exchangers and then we are selling that off to the Heat Nets and we are we are uh heating 10,000 of houses and apartments with that heat so that's really the circular economy so that's why these clients like that so much they come with where their critical mass HBC and AI workloads they love to come at it and we love to do that more it's and actually I can say it's not only in Europe we have quite some us clients who bring that to us as well so they have found that I got to just emphasize a really fascinating point I think sometimes when we think about sustainability we think about Net Zero or we think about carbon emissions or we think about literal energy but it's wild to think that the machines powering our AI future and perhaps AI that could control the thermostat in my house could also be the liquid cooling responsible for then heating the system as a result exactly and think about you know when you're when you're looking to the next generation of Technology right the CPUs the gpus of the tomorrow World they are going to consume more and more energy in exponentially exponentially yeah we're talking orders of magnitude here that's and and we had a um earlier today a meeting with a customer and the discussion was not when they are go if they are going to liquid cool is when you are going to liquid cool right and and that is a discussion which you need to start planning it now in order to make the uh understanding about what you're going to be one one year and a half two years from now on because that will come massively into uh into this industry and and we need to make the systems possible to be managed into a solution like that and if we are not driving into a sustainable way then the overall system is we're going to hit a dead end exactly it's a dead end there's no way to get around that and I think that's really important I love that you we representing a lot of geography here J you're from Belgium San we've got you from Romania which I think is awesome and I and I actually want to talk about that because there in one of our goals for the show this week is to separate some of the myth from reality when it comes to Ai and HPC very relevant to our discussion here but I'm very curious because you know renewable energy in the nordics you've obviously got a very excited community in Romania will Ai and HPC Computing not only democratize AI or the access to this but also lift up other Global geographies and bring them into this high-tech fold do you think we're going to and I I I think you're if you're looking into this direction you can compare it like I don't know we we talked just prior to the to the show you can compare it to the first automobile right when it appeared there were no safety belts there were no uh differentiation in fuel uh there were no signs on the street everybody was driving on the right or the left side well let's not go there right uh that's a debate for over we talking about later but it's it's at the beginning mhm the landscape of providers into artificial intelligence space is daunting I mean enormous right which is exceptional because this means a lot of innovation will come and when you are looking to what we are driving it's exactly into this direction we are trying to democratize the uh the infrastructure and the the solution we are bringing together then we are going to advance putting more new solution and then we are going to innovate yesterday we have the HPC Community event which was outstanding the level of conversation uh we had at North we had Bing we had um University of Cambridge um we have t as well there so it was the and the differences in between what the peoples are implementing and what they are talking goes into the same direction the future is bright we were actually commenting on the the Dell HBC Community event you guys had yesterday again yeah it wasn't just Dell though you was everybody in the ecosystem and I think boing had a great example showing the visibility into Quantum and and Nvidia andd and it's a whole ecos and my favorite my favorite line that I think encapsulated was the the guy guy from tac he said AI vindicates the HPC way yeah and I think that's the conversation that we're having here so far is dominating the Q end always and I'll ask you guys the same question what is the impact to AI on the HPC and the needs of the evolving data center because with Cloud operations you're now seeing not repatriation net new architectural shifts new build outs more gpus more needs for alternative to gpus more interconnects AI Hardware is dominating the hyperscalers involved this is a whole new ball game what do you guys see the AI impact for HBC well the the number of use cases are just enormous and we still are discovering more and more every day every meeting I hear about new use cases and uh yeah being it in finance being it in automotive being it in Airplane being it in in business whatever they are all finding new use cases and we find them within the ecosystem for the improving the solutions where where actually it's happening for example optimizing the data sense because the gpus are generating they're using quite some quite some power they they generating quite some heat and you can if you don't do this right the whole the whole system can melt down if you don't do this right so AI is used and computation fluid dynamics is used to optimize the data Cent to optimize the whole thing technology within the solution itself but outside it's just hilarious and we see this now in HBC we are working also with uh with uh developers companies developing HBC software and so on Nei software and the two are merging they're using AI within the HBC to improve where calculations are normally taking way too long if you read to calculate over and over again I can use another example I'm meeting the guys later today it's a weather forecasting company here in the in the Colorado area and they're really applying more and more AI to predict the weather and to uh to impact what what can be done with climate that that's that democratization piece you were just referring to that that is a huge Point yeah so I and again I don't think that those words are excluding those are starting to combine and the HPC and AI they're going to combine and you you'll see systems right now running an HPC workload tomorrow being redesigned reconfigured in order to run an AI workload the an inferencing or a training of a large and then you're moving again to something else and and this I I think that the challenge we are looking right now is to finding the people which are able to to drive this one in the past was easy you get the several students and it was cheap now you you you're facing for a lot of resources and you need to find those resources to attract them into the ecosystem and to develop them first of all I want to just say you guys are both excited I can tell by that question AI is is hot why is AI important and because everyone's excited the enthusiasm high is is is that what's going to change in the ecosystem cuz you're teasing it out use cases are expanding developer new talents coming in entrepreneurial energy you start to see this tier 2 you know core weav of the World building on top of bare metal what's happening what's the real driver you know and I'm getting back to the use cases they are absolutely vertical use cases but there are a lot of horizontal use cases that every company on this Earth will have a sales a market a finance an ARR Department what if your ARR department will be able to tell you what is the attrition risk of a specific individual or if your finance department will tell you what is the most likely uh risk assessment for a for a loan or you are doing a road optimization in so or you are doing a better offer a better uh sales proposition instead of doing one per day you can do 10 per day and I think that this will improve the capacity of the companies to be more agile to be more Innovative and to be able to respond to the customers in a much faster way and be more Innovative as well so they drive they really The Innovation is also uh exponential in a way what is possible so they discover the combinations of what was possible and what what what they really look at now for the new use cases That's so exciting to see this uh this uh this ever new ideas popping up I mean it it is is thrilling and and one of the things that I always remind myself in the both in the AI space and in the quantum space is we're going to be answering questions we don't even know how to ask yet which is yeah exactly but think about this one one year ago there were very few people speaking about generative AI yeah oh yeah one at Christmas I was together with my family and my friends everybody below 25 years old knew what it was in the market everybody above that age was like what what are you talking what are you talking about what Market education is wildly and everybody everything changed into what one year yeah yeah is it one year it was developed No it started in the' 40s that's that's the different story oh no I know but but but but it's amazing how fast is the adoption how fast is the and and you got got to say dell is on on the right wave I talked to multiple execs over your company it's clear There's an opportunity for Dell to ride this next wave like you did all the other Generations PC web mobile and now desktop you brought up a good point data drives this so now okay so you have everyone understanding AI the role of data is going to be more and more important so the storage how packets move from one point to the other that's is and then you know what what do it Go who computes on it this is classic data center nuts and bolts storage servers and networking we're back we're back we we never left we're back and probably here it will come what what G is mentioning about is the data locality because you can't have have the compute somewhere and the data somewhere else you need to you you need to get them together because else the latency will become too large and you will not be able to to benefit from the from the Innovation but this is why we put prop proposed a a dedicated line of servers for this machine you know so you know if you're looking to the XC 9680 which is the 8way GPU machine this is a beast but this is a beast which is what you need to run in order to be able you crank out the AI I mean beast mode there yeah there definitely is beast mode speaking of beast mode you just had a very interesting acquisition can you tell me about the compute acquisition yeah so I I started off by saying we look at the workloads and then we see what's coming out and actually we have been of course building the technology from the ground up from the data centers and we happy to provide the data centers to large companies who know what they're doing and they bring it in themselves or we provide HPC nii as a service also for this always for this HPC ni workloads now we required compute who actually start from the workloads they start from the from the engineering workloads from the simulation workloads from the AI workloads and actually they are pre-installed the applications we pre-installed them so actually the users the scientists or the engineers or the simulation Engineers they just say okay what do I want to run I put my data and they hit and it's it's working it's not like people need to think oh how this this needs to be configured pride and lose a lot of time before they can actually run it because that's why they do it they need to run the simulation need to run the AI inference or or or machine learning and it's then also about getting the data fast enough to the gpus to keep them busy not having to wait for the data so that is what the computer acquisition brings is that from the applications downwards we were already very strong in from the from all the uh the energy the data Cent the networks the the compute the storage and so upwards so now we have the two that comes together which is helping for the time to Market and the the the uh the productivity of the users yeah having computer agent AED engineering pre-installed it's that it's really that 0 to 60 moment that you get to faster and then can start seeing what's going to happen on the road trip and and get on the journey AB absolutely and this is why we position for instance we have POS Del validated design which are giving the the blueprint if you like of how to select the infrastructure dedicated for your workload if it's an inferencing if it's a training it's if it's a pre-training model just to have the understanding of how to do this it's not just putting things together is putting is providing you an infrastructure which works it's tested it's validated and we know it's working I love that sobron you brought up a really great point last question to both of you is your noodling you mentioned a year ago we were not talking about generative AI when we have you back on the cube next year at supercomputing what are we going to be talking about that is maybe just a murmur in the hallway track right now wow I I I sense that what we are looking into the next year is that the lot of Enterprises will move from a pilot into full development of their AI infrastructure and then you know I don't have the I have the cube but I don't have the crystal ball um I I I sense as well that we are going to see a lot of developments into the infrastructure there are new processor new gpus new connectivity and we have a lot of um examples from what can be done differently than the traditional way of doing it love it great answer look forward to playing back that footage next year and and seeing how it teas up G what's your prediction so I agree and I would would like to add now today a lot of Mach machine learning is still happening a lot of models are being created and yes we see the test with HPT and and the large language models but I think the the inference the real usage of the models I think that's going to boom and that's as you say the Enterprises are all looking into it some are more advanced than others but they will get there they they see the point and it's really their board their their executive teams they get it and they really they cannot wait to see the results in their organizations so I think that going to make a big difference absolutely the uptake of this the real usage of this in the whole economy in the whole ecosystem in the absolutely absolutely agree lots more case studies lots more reason to celebrate G reason to come back yeah you yes we would love to have you back thank you both for an absolutely fantastic informative dialogue about sustainable business in HPC and AI John thank you for your cander and your fabulous questions and thank you to our fabulous super Computing Community out there tuning in live to our coverage here from Denver Colorado my name is Savannah Peterson you're watching the cube the leading source for emerging Tech news
2023-11-28 17:15
