Taming the Accelerator Cambrian Explosion with Omnia
Thu, 23 Sep 2021 18:29:00 -0000
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We are in the midst of a compute accelerator renaissance. Myriad new hardware accelerator companies are springing up with novel architectures and execution models for accelerating simulation and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, each with a purported advantage over the others. Many are still in stealth, some have become public knowledge, others have started selling hardware, and still others have been gobbled up by larger, established players. This frenzied activity in the hardware space, driven by the growth of AI as a way to extract even greater value from new and existing data, has led some to liken it to the “Cambrian Explosion,” when life on Earth diversified at a rate not seen before or since.
If you’re in the business of standing up and maintaining infrastructure for high-performance computing and AI, this type of rapid diversification can be terrifying. How do I deal with all of these new hardware components? How do I manage all of the device drivers? What about all of the device plugins and operators necessary to make them function in my container-orchestrated environment? Data scientists and computational researchers often want the newest technology available, but putting it into production can be next to impossible. It’s enough to keep HPC/AI systems administrators lying awake at night.
At Dell Technologies, we now offer many different accelerator technologies within our PowerEdge server portfolio, from Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in multiple sizes to Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based accelerators. And there are even more to come. We understand that it can be a daunting task to manage all of this different hardware – it’s something we do every day in Dell Technologies’ HPC & AI Innovation Lab. So we’ve developed a mechanism for detecting, identifying, and deploying various accelerator technologies in an automated way, helping us to simplify our own deployment headaches. And we’ve integrated that capability into Omnia, an open-source, community-driven high-performance cluster deployment project started by Dell Technologies and Intel.
Deploy-time accelerator detection and installation
We recognize that tomorrow’s high-performance clusters will not be fully homogenous, consisting of exact copies of the same compute building block replicated tens, hundreds, or thousands of times. Instead clusters are becoming more heterogeneous, consisting of as many as a dozen different server configurations, all tied together under a single (or in some cases – multiple) scheduler or container orchestrator.
This heterogeneity can be a problem for many of today’s cluster deployment tools, which rely on the concept of the “golden image” – a complete image of the server's operating system, hardware drivers, and software stack. The golden image model is extremely useful in many environments, such as homogeneous and diskless deployments. But in the clusters of tomorrow, which will try to capture the amazing potential of this hardware diversity, the golden image model becomes unmanageable.
Instead, Omnia does not rely on the golden image. We think of cluster deployment like 3D-printing – rapidly placing layer after layer of software components and capabilities on top of the hardware until a functional server building block emerges. This allows us, with the use of some intelligent detection and logic, to build bespoke software stacks for each server building block; on demand, at deploy time. From Omnia’s perspective, there’s really no difference between deploying a compute server with no accelerators into a cluster versus deploying a compute server with GPUs or FPGAs into that same cluster. We simply pick different component layers during the process.
What does this mean for cluster deployment?
It means that clusters can now be built from a variety of heterogeneous server building blocks, all managed together as a single entity. Instead of a cluster of CPU servers, another cluster of GPU-accelerated servers, and yet another cluster of FPGA-accelerated servers, research and HPC IT organizations can manage a single resource with all of the different types of technologies that their users demand, all connected by a unified network fabric and sharing a set of unified storage solutions.
And by using Omnia, the process of deploying clusters of heterogeneous building blocks has been dramatically simplified. Regardless of how many types of building blocks an organization wants to use within their next-generation cluster, it can all be deployed using the same approach, and at the same time. There’s no need to build special images for this type of server and that type of server, simply start the Omnia deployment process and Omnia’s intelligent software deployment system will do the rest.
Learn more
Omnia is available to download on GitHub today. You can learn more about the Omnia project in our previous blog post.