NVIDIA Unveils AI Platform to Minimize Downtime in Supercomputing Data Centers

NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA Mellanox UFM Cyber-AI platform, which minimizes downtime in InfiniBand data centers by harnessing AI-powered analytics to detect security threats and operational issues, as well as predict network failures.

This extension of the UFM platform product portfolio applies AI to learn a data center’s operational cadence and network workload patterns, drawing on real-time and historic telemetry and workload data. Against this baseline, it tracks the system’s health and network modifications, and detects performance degradations, usage and profile changes.

The new platform provides alerts of abnormal system and application behavior, and potential system failures and threats, as well as performs corrective actions. It is also targeted to deliver security alerts in cases of attempted system hacking to host undesired applications, such as cryptocurrency mining. 

“The UFM Cyber-AI platform determines a data center’s unique vital signs and uses them to identify performance degradation, component failures and abnormal usage patterns,” says Gilad Shainer, senior vice president of marketing for Mellanox networking at NVIDIA. “It allows system administrators to quickly detect and respond to potential security threats and address upcoming failures, saving cost and ensuring consistent service to customers.”

Ecosystem Support

Organizations that have long been employing the UFM platform in their data centers have expressed strong interest in the latest offering.

“NCI plays a pivotal role in the national research landscape,” says Allan Williams, associate director of services and technology at the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia). “Our supercomputing infrastructure serves 5,000 researchers who use it for critical national and global activities. UFM enables us to effectively manage our supercomputers and to optimize performance.”

“We have been using the UFM platform for years in our InfiniBand data centers,” says Douglas Johnson, associate director of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. “UFM and the expertise from the Mellanox networking team have been fundamental ingredients in the management of our network and the stability we’ve achieved.”

Extending UFM Platform

The UFM Cyber-AI platform complements the UFM Enterprise platform, which provides network monitoring, management, performance optimization, configuration checks and secure cable management.

NVIDIA also added today a third member of the UFM family, the UFM Telemetry platform. This tool captures real-time network telemetry data, which is streamed to an on-premises or cloud-based database to monitor network performance and validate the network configuration.

Supporting Resources

Learn more about the UFM Appliance product line.

Learn more about NVIDIA Mellanox Quantum HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand Smart Switches.

Learn more about NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX®-6 HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand adapters.

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.

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