Energy Efficiency and Performance: MI300X in Data Centers

Advertisements in IT-oriented magazines often show an ideal, sanitized view of a data center, with row upon row of neat, organized racks that hold server hardware from one manufacturer. The aisles are wide and well lit, with nary a stray cable or random tool bag to be seen.

If you have ever visited a corporate data center, you know that real life rarely matches up with the glossy photos in the ads. The typical corporate data center grows organically, with several generations of server hardware from different manufacturers mounted wherever there was space at the time. Cable management is sometimes an afterthought.These can be dusty places with poor lighting and makeshift storage for tools, parts, and forgotten bric-a-brac.

There is, however, something to be said for the concept of the ideal data center shown in the IT ads—in particular when it comes to building a data center for training, testing, and operating AI models. We discuss the advantages of this concept below.

The Monolithic Data Center

Southwest Airlines owes part of its success to its standard, one-type of airplane: the Boeing 737. This was a deliberate decision to simplify their operations and reduce costs. With one model of aircraft, they reduce the complexity of their ground operations at airports, and all of their mechanics can work on any plane in their fleet. Southwest has what we call a monolithic fleet.

In a similar way, a data center (or each area dedicated to a specific task such as storage, general-purpose computing, and AI support) can be said to be monolithic if all the servers are identical. A monolithic data center imparts a number of benefits, such as:

• Reduced personnel costs: As Southwest Airlines found with their monolithic fleet, technicians and system administrators in a monolithic data center need to be knowledgeable on only one, standard technology stack, and these resources are more or less interchangeable.
• Better resilience: When one server fails, it’s easier to move the tasks that were running on it to another machine—because they are all alike and don’t need to be reconfigured to take over the failed server’s tasks.
• Reduced acquisition costs: An organization that builds a monolithic data center can often realize bulk discounts if they buy all the same hardware—rather than buy smaller quantities of different hardware models.

AI-Specific Advantages: The AMD MI300X

In the case of data centers built to support AI development and operation, some additional benefits apply. For this discussion, we focus on the AMD MI300X GPU, which is the foundation of the TensorWave AI cloud platform.

Performance

AMD sells its MI300X GPU as a single rack-mounted server, but unless you are developing small (by today’s standards) AI models, you likely need to use more than one that works in parallel with others. To this end, AMD designed the MI300X for scalability so that the workload can be distributed among multiple GPUs.

AMD also offers its MI300X Platform device, which combines eight MI300X GPUs and supporting circuitry in one more-powerful device. This itself can be joined with other MI300X Platform nodes for even greater performance. Furthermore, AMD’s ROCm software automatically breaks down training tasks into manageable chunks and assigns them among the MI300X GPUs that are available in your environment.

The enhanced performance enabled by the scalability and parallel processing of the MI300X can significantly reduce your training cycle time. And, the automatic load management provided by ROCm means you don’t have to invent it yourself.

Energy Efficiency

In particular with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), AI training has become an expensive and energy-intensive activity. By at least one estimate, the training of GPT-3, the predecessor to OpenAI’s current flagship GPT-4 LLM, occupied 9,200 GPUs for two weeks and cost the company $4.6 million. There’s no telling how much it cost them to train the much larger GPT-4.

Thus, energy efficiency is an important consideration for most organizations with AI aspirations. Here again, a monolithic data center based on the MI300X offers some advantages. The scalable design of the MI300X, especially on the integrated MI300X Platform, means that you can realize greater performance in absolute terms plus greater performance per watt to save you money and reduce the carbon footprint of your AI projects.

TensorWave’s MI300X Data Center

With the benefits of a monolithic data center in mind, we at TensorWave built our cloud-based AI development environment from the ground up using the MI300X as our standard GPU. Our design enables us to offer the best in availability, performance, scalability, and efficiency of any AI cloud development offering on the market today.

Furthermore, you don’t need to fight for time on our GPUs. Whether you choose the fully managed support option or the bare-metal option—which enables you to manage and configure your environment to your specifications—you have access to as many GPUs as you need, when you need them.

About TensorWave

TensorWave is a cutting-edge cloud platform designed specifically for AI workloads. Offering AMD MI300X accelerators and a best-in-class inference engine, TensorWave is a top-choice for training, fine-tuning, and inference. Visit tensorwave.com to learn more.