Data center and colocation provider Equinix is inviting companies to test-drive the NVIDIA DGX A100 system at its International Business Exchange (IBX) data center in Los Angeles (the company currently has more than 200 IBX centers in 52 markets). This site is currently the only place in the world where companies can take advantage of the DGX A100 to test drive their AI equipment. According to the Equinix testbed landing page, “The test drive solution brings together industry-leading AI hardware from NVIDIA and NetApp alongside best-in-class software technology from Core Scientific, all directly connected on Platform Equinix.”

The DGX A100 system “is designed to unify AI workloads for training, inference and data analytics on one platform, simplify infrastructure, and accelerate ROI,” notes Santosh Rao for the NetApp Blog. “DGX A100 is a universal building block for data center AI, supporting DL training, inferencing, data science and other high-performance workloads from a single platform … NetApp ONTAP AI will be among the first converged AI stacks to incorporate the DGX A100 and NVIDIA Mellanox networking.”

“Multiple smaller workloads can be accelerated by partitioning the DGX A100 into as many as 56 instances per system, using new multi-instance GPU technology,” explains Rao. “This enables enterprises to allocate GPU performance very efficiently in both ONTAP AI and DGX SuperPOD configurations.”

Equinix notes some of the key benefits of AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) powered by Equinix, NVIDIA DGX A100 (above) and NetApp ONTAP AI:

• AI as a Managed Service: A cloud-native (container-based) AI as a Service offering that makes it easy for data scientists to consume AI services.
• Industry-leading AI technology stack: Consisting of high-performing compute, network and storage technologies that are optimized for running all the major AI software frameworks.
• AI stack at global interconnected metro edge: A global and highly interconnected data center platform that provides high-speed and secure interconnection to IT systems and data sources that are spread across public clouds, private data centers and edge locations.