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NVA-1173 NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA DGX Systems - Software Components

Contributors kevin-hoke ntapdave
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This section focuses on the software components of the NetApp AIPod with NVIDIA DGX systems.

NVIDIA Software

NVIDIA Base Command

NVIDIA Base Command™ powers every DGX BasePOD, enabling organizations to leverage the best of NVIDIA software innovation. Enterprises can unleash the full potential of their investment with a proven platform that includes enterprise-grade orchestration and cluster management, libraries that accelerate compute, storage and network infrastructure, and an operating system (OS) optimized for AI workloads.

NVIDIA BaseCommand solution

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NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC)

NVIDIA NGC™ provides software to meet the needs of data scientists, developers, and researchers with various levels of AI expertise. Software hosted on NGC undergoes scans against an aggregated set of common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs), crypto, and private keys. It is tested and designed to scale to multiple GPUs and in many cases, to multi-node, ensuring users maximize their investment in DGX systems.

NVIDIA GPU Cloud

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NVIDIA AI Enterprise

NVIDIA AI Enterprise is the end-to-end software platform that brings generative AI into reach for every enterprise, providing the fastest and most efficient runtime for generative AI foundation models optimized to run on the NVIDIA DGX platform. With production-grade security, stability, and manageability, it streamlines the development of generative AI solutions. NVIDIA AI Enterprise is included with DGX BasePOD for enterprise developers to access pretrained models, optimized frameworks, microservices, accelerated libraries, and enterprise support.

NetApp Software

NetApp ONTAP

ONTAP 9, the latest generation of storage management software from NetApp, enables businesses to modernize infrastructure and transition to a cloud-ready data center. Leveraging industry-leading data management capabilities, ONTAP enables the management and protection of data with a single set of tools, regardless of where that data resides. You can also move data freely to wherever it is needed: the edge, the core, or the cloud. ONTAP 9 includes numerous features that simplify data management, accelerate, and protect critical data, and enable next generation infrastructure capabilities across hybrid cloud architectures.

Accelerate and protect data

ONTAP delivers superior levels of performance and data protection and extends these capabilities in the following ways:

  • Performance and lower latency. ONTAP offers the highest possible throughput at the lowest possible latency, including support for NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage (GDS) using NFS over RDMA, parallel NFS (pNFS), and NFS session trunking.

  • Data protection. ONTAP provides built-in data protection capabilities and the industry's strongest anti-ransomware guarantee with common management across all platforms.

  • NetApp Volume Encryption (NVE). ONTAP offers native volume-level encryption with both onboard and External Key Management support.

  • Storage multitenancy and multifactor authentication. ONTAP enables sharing of infrastructure resources with the highest levels of security.

Simplify data management

Data management is crucial to enterprise IT operations and data scientists so that appropriate resources are used for AI applications and training AI/ML datasets. The following additional information about NetApp technologies is out of scope for this validation but might be relevant depending on your deployment.

ONTAP data management software includes the following features to streamline and simplify operations and reduce your total cost of operation:

  • Snapshots and clones enable collaboration, parallel experimentation and enhanced data governance for ML/DL workflows.

  • SnapMirror enables seamless data movement in hybrid cloud and multi-site environments, delivering data where and when it's needed.

  • Inline data compaction and expanded deduplication. Data compaction reduces wasted space inside storage blocks, and deduplication significantly increases effective capacity. This applies to data stored locally and data tiered to the cloud.

  • Minimum, maximum, and adaptive quality of service (AQoS). Granular quality of service (QoS) controls help maintain performance levels for critical applications in highly shared environments.

  • NetApp FlexGroups enable distribution of data across all nodes in the storage cluster providing massive capacity and higher performance for extremely large datasets.

  • NetApp FabricPool. Provides automatic tiering of cold data to public and private cloud storage options, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and NetApp StorageGRID storage solution. For more information about FabricPool, see TR-4598: FabricPool best practices.

  • NetApp FlexCache. Provides remote volume caching capabilities that simplify file distribution, reduces WAN latency, and lowers WAN bandwidth costs. FlexCache enables distributed product development across multiple sites, as well as accelerated access to corporate datasets from remote locations.

Future-proof infrastructure

ONTAP helps meet demanding and constantly changing business needs with the following features:

  • Seamless scaling and non disruptive operations. ONTAP supports the online addition of capacity to existing controllers and to scale-out clusters. Customers can upgrade to the latest technologies, such as NVMe and 32Gb FC, without costly data migrations or outages.

  • Cloud connection. ONTAP is the most cloud-connected storage management software, with options for software-defined storage (ONTAP Select) and cloud-native instances (Google Cloud NetApp Volumes) in all public clouds.

  • Integration with emerging applications. ONTAP offers enterprise-grade data services for next generation platforms and applications, such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and Industry 4.0, by using the same infrastructure that supports existing enterprise apps.

NetApp DataOps Toolkit

The NetApp DataOps Toolkit is a Python-based tool that simplifies the management of development/training workspaces and inference servers that are backed by high-performance, scale-out NetApp storage. The DataOps Toolkit can operate as a stand-alone utility, and is even more effective in Kubernetes environments leveraging NetApp Trident to automate storage operations. Key capabilities include:

  • Rapidly provision new high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces that are backed by high-performance, scale-out NetApp storage.

  • Rapidly provision new NVIDIA Triton Inference Server instances that are backed by enterprise-class NetApp storage.

  • Near-instantaneous cloning of high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces in order to enable experimentation or rapid iteration.

  • Near-instantaneous snapshots of high-capacity JupyterLab workspaces for backup and/or traceability/baselining.

  • Near-instantaneous provisioning, cloning, and snapshots of high-capacity, high-performance data volumes.

NetApp Trident

Trident is a fully supported, open-source storage orchestrator for containers and Kubernetes distributions, including Anthos. Trident works with the entire NetApp storage portfolio, including NetApp ONTAP, and it also supports NFS, NVMe/TCP, and iSCSI connections. Trident accelerates the DevOps workflow by allowing end users to provision and manage storage from their NetApp storage systems without requiring intervention from a storage administrator.