overview
Weka maximizes GPU investments for WeRide by delivering high I/O bandwidth at scale to its GPU Farm.
WeRide focuses on strategic alliances among Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology companies, car makers, and mobility service platform providers. WeRide RoboTaxi, a joint venture company of WeRide, Baiyun Taxi, and SCI (Guangzhou) Group, has a robotaxi program in Guangzhou, China that covers 144.65 square kilometers in the Huangpu and Guangzhou Development Districts, providing the locals with robotaxi services on their daily commute. This is the first robotaxi service that is open to the public in China.
“We built a GPU farm, and we needed a high-speed data pipe to feed it. We evaluated open source solutions, HDFS, and the public cloud. We chose Weka for its ability to provide cost-effective, high-bandwidth I/O to our GPUs, product maturity, customer references, and stellar on-demand support.”
Paul Liu, Engineering Operations LeadTHE NEW SOLUTION HAD TO MEET SEVERAL KEY CRITERIA:
Maximize utilization of the GPU farm
Offer a hybrid implementation model to reduce datacenter footprint
Deliver the best economic value for capacity planning and future performance
Provide flexibility through hardware-agnostic compatibility with commodity servers
SOLUTION
THE WEKA FILE SYSTEM SOFTWARE ON COMMODITY SERVERS AND AWS
Extensive cost-analysis of various scenarios utilizing open source solutions and HDFS to feed data to the GPU farm proved that all alternative approaches would not to be cost-effective. Ultimately, WeRide chose a hybrid implementation using WekaFS. WekaFS has a two-tier architecture that takes commodity servers and the public cloud and presents them as a single hybrid storage solution. On premises, WeRide manages hundreds of TBs of NVMe flash on Weka, using commodity Intel x86-based servers from AMAX and Mellanox Ethernet network switches. WeRide was also the first customer to use Weka to deliver high-bandwidth I/O to its GPU resources in AWS China. The WeRide team lauds the collaboration with the Weka Technical Support team that made for a seamless public cloud implementation.
Benefits and ROI
WeRide was able to realize several benefits and tremendous return on investment by choosing WekaFS:
Acceleration of product development
Hardware-agnostic software
Cost-efficiency
Improved Resource Utilization
