Dell Technologies said it will support Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with Nvidia systems as it rolled out a set of Dell PowerEdge servers with HGX H200, HGX B100, HGX B200 and GB200 SuperChip.
The servers, which include Dell's first liquid-cooling system, headlined a slate of additions for the IT giant. Dell's most recent earnings call highlighted strength in AI-optimized systems and a strong backlog. Dell, HPE and SuperMicro have all seen stock gains as AI-optimized systems start to sell well. Dell outlined its additions following Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's keynote.
In addition, generative AI workloads appear to be moving on-premise due to cost, latency and data security.
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Varun Chhabra, SVP of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group and Telecom units, said: "one of the things that has been coming out loud and clear as we talk to customers is bringing GenAI to the enterprise where customer data is continues to be challenging," said Chhabra, who said data silos, governance, compliance and policies are all trouble spots. "We want turnkey solutions that package up storage, compute, networking, GPUs and a software stack that's easy to understand and consume."
Here's the roundup of what Dell announced in support of Nvidia's GTC launches to cover training to inference.
- PowerEdge XE9680 with 2x performance with Nvidia HGX H200.
- PowerEdge XE9680 also has options for next-generation AI acceleration with air-cooled Nvidia HGX B100 and Dell's first liquid-cooled 8-way GPU with Nvidia HGX B200.
- Dell will support Nvidia's GB200 SuperChip, which will feature real-time inferencing with multi-trillion parameter models, 40x lower total cost of ownership compared to Nvidia 8-way HGX H100 and 20x better processing performance.
- Systems will support InfiniBand BlueField3 SuperNIC options as well as Spectrum-X Ethernet AI fabric. Dell has supported InfiniBand, but is adding Spectrum-X to the mix.
- PowerEdge R760xa will support Nvidia's Omniverse OVX 3.0 platform.
- Dell's system RAG design will have Nvidia microservices via NEMO and embedding framework in PowerEdge, PowerScale and PowerSwitch gear.
- PowerScale ethernet storage will have Nvidia DGX SuperPOD validation.
- Dell Data Lakehouse, which will have an analytics engine powered by Starburst.
With the Dell Data Lakehouse, Greg Findlen, senior vice president of Dell's infrastructure solutions group (ISG), AI and data management solutions, said the data lakehouse effort is designed to connect clusters on-premises and in the cloud. "We want to make it easy to scale on-premises and control cost," said Findlen. "GenAI bills are getting more expensive, and enterprise want to leverage local processing wherever that is."
Ihab Tarazi, CTO AI and Compute, Dell ISG, said enterprises have experimented with models in the public cloud, but are looking on-premises for some workloads. The Dell data lakehouse effort also plays into the company's partnership with HuggingFace.
To tie together the AI-stack and software, Dell has also launched services.
