overview
WEKA allows Cerence to support the use of both the POSIX file system and object storage in a cost-effective way.
Cerence is building speech language models to improve the in-car experience, specifically using AI to deliver a deep understanding of human behavior, culture, and language. Its mission is to help make automotive transport safer and human interaction with the car more natural and comfortable. The compute infrastructure at Cerence supports multiple mixed workflows: speech language models; those for rapidly growing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) efforts; Text to Speech; and Predictive Keyboards — a pattern recognition effort.
“We looked at our legacy architecture and instead of taking an evolutionary step and upgrading every component, we took the revolutionary approach. WEKA cost-effectively enables both the use of POSIX and object storage with performance and latency that is far superior to any other solution.”
Bridget Collins, Chief Information OfficerSOLUTION
THE WEKA FILE SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON HPE SERVERS
WEKA has a two-tier architecture that takes NVMe flash and disk-based technologies and presents them as a single hybrid storage solution. The Cerence IT team decided to implement WEKA in a converged mode with WEKA running on GPU servers, creating a single namespace from all the locally attached NVMe drives. The team is managing 900TB of data on the WEKA file system to support the NLP and NLU workloads on a cluster consisting of 40 HPE Proliant DL360 servers, each with dual 25GbE networking adapters. The servers are interconnected with 4 switches for high availability (HA), performance, and redundancy. Each server has one network connection and two NVMe drives dedicated to WEKA and one GPU card. Cerence IT is managing 3.2PB of data on object storage with SUSE Enterprise Storage, with 900TB assigned to WEKA, running on a cluster consisting of 9 HPE Apollo 4200 servers, each with twenty-four 14TB drives. The team also utilizes an HPE Apollo 6500 server with 8 GPUs for multi-GPU processing.
Benefits and ROI
Cerence was able to realize several benefits and tremendous return on investment by choosing WEKA: