Supermicro, Inc., a Total IT Solution Provider for AI, Cloud, Storage, and 5G/Edge, is launching a new optimized storage system for high performance AI training, inference and HPC workloads. This JBOF (Just a Bunch of Flash) system utilizes up to four NVIDIA BlueField-3 data processing units (DPUs) in a 2U form factor to run software-defined storage workloads. Each BlueField-3 DPU features 400 Gb Ethernet or InfiniBand networking and hardware acceleration for high computation storage and networking workloads such as encryption, compression and erasure coding, as well as AI storage expansion. The state-of-the-art, dual port JBOF architecture enables active-active clustering ensuring high availability for scale up mission critical storage applications as well as scale-out storage such as object storage and parallel file systems.

"Supermicro's new high performance JBOF Storage System is designed using our Building Block approach which enables support for either E3.S or U.2 form-factor SSDs and the latest PCIe Gen 5 connectivity for the SSDs and the DPU networking and storage platform," said Charles Liang, president and CEO of Supermicro. "Supermicro's system design supports 24 or 36 SSD's enabling up to 1.105PB of raw capacity using 30.71 TB SSDs. Our balanced network and storage I/O design can saturate the full 400 Gb/s BlueField-3 line-rate realizing more than 250 GB/s bandwidth of the Gen 5 SSDs."The Supermicro JBOF with NVIDIA BlueField-3 solution replaces the traditional storage CPU and memory subsystem with the BlueField-3 DPU and runs the storage application on the DPU's 16 Arm cores. In addition to storage acceleration such as erasure coding and decompression algorithms, the BlueField-3 also accelerates networking through hardware support for RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), GPU Direct Storage and GPU Initiated Storage.

"Accelerated computing and AI are transforming every industry and delivering benefits for society," said Kevin Deierling, senior vice president of networking at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs enable innovative solutions like the Supermicro Petascale JBOF, which is the foundation for a new class of AI data platforms delivering extreme performance and efficiency."

In collaboration with NVIDIA, Supermicro is creating a new JBOF ecosystem including data platform company Hammerspace and object storage provider Cloudian to enable these storage infrastructure software platforms to run natively on the NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPU in the Supermicro JBOF. In addition, Supermicro has qualified SSDs from Micron and KIOXIA with the JBOF system to provide a range of capacities and single and dual-port capability."The Supermicro JBOF using NVIDIA's BlueField-3 DPU offers a highly integrated storage approach for large-scale AI training and analytics storage workloads," said Ashish Nadkarni, Group Vice President and General Manager, Worldwide Infrastructure Research at IDC. "This implementation provides a more power efficient solution than CPU-based storage servers and lower read latency due to the direct data path provided by the JBOF and DPU architecture. Supermicro and NVIDIA have assembled an ecosystem of partners which makes this something that all large-scale AI, CSP and HPC customers should consider."