Las Vegas, Nevada, January 19, 2021 – Seagate is the newest member of the Innovations for Digital Infrastructure (I4DI),
a partnership of innovative global technology leaders that are developing European-based supercomputing solutions to advance the region’s capabilities in solving the performance, power and efficiency issues challenging the industry today. It joins founding members PosAm, Towercom and Tachyum, and thus the partnership with SAV (Slovak Academy of Sciences) and MIRRI SR (Ministry of Investment, Regional Development and Informatization of the Slovak Republic) within National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC).
I4DI provides freedom and openness similar to Open Compute to the European HPC market. The consortium brings together companies in storage, networking, rack manufacturing, power, software, services and telecommunications spaces to help transform the entire EU region from an importer of data centre and supercomputer technologies to an innovative leader in research for worldwide AI and HPC solutions. Seagate brings to the I4DI its 40+ years of experience in helping overcome exponential data growth with its breakthrough hard drives, solid state drives, systems and recovery services.
“We recognise the importance of working with fellow technology companies to develop solutions that better both the industry as a whole and our standing within it,” said Mohamad El-Batal, EDS Chief Technologist and a member of the Seagate CTO office. “Joining the I4DI provides us with the opportunity to expand innovation that addresses the specific needs of the EMEA region while advancing technologies that can then be deployed to a worldwide marketplace. We look forward to the I4DI being a fruitful endeavour for all involved.”
The EU consumes 30 percent of the world’s supercomputing resources but has only 5 percent of the world’s capacity based on a recent EU report. This discrepancy has led the EU Commission to set out to determine its own destiny by building its own supercomputers and data centres, with improved efficiency and resource utilisation to combat against increased carbon emissions and global warming associated with traditional compute infrastructures.
I4DI-designed datacentres will serve as a blueprint for future government or commercial cloud initiatives such as InoCloud. Because of dual use – both commercially and for government/AI workloads, new I4DI datacentres will be more efficient, enabling hardware utilisation rates to improve to more than 90 percent vs. their current 40 percent utilisation rates.
For example, NSCC (National Supercomputing Centre) is expected to operate one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers to solve the data and technological sovereignty challenges of the EU. This Slovak national computing centre will showcase the world’s first universal processor Prodigy from Tachyum, which can switch seamlessly among hyperscale, AI and HPC workloads. Its class-leading performance, efficiency and cost is expected to garner international attention while accelerating migration of Prodigy-based solutions to public and private cloud infrastructures.
"We are pleased to have multibillion-dollar industry heavyweight Seagate throw its considerable capabilities and resources into the I4DI initiative as we look to continue building the EU’s status as a technology centre of excellence,” said Dr Radoslav Danilak, Tachyum founder and CEO. “Places like Slovakia specifically and the European continent in general have the human capital and capabilities needed to drive the technology industry and with the backing of the I4DI, we will be able to develop, foster and grow these capabilities to significantly improve the performance for cutting-edge data centre, AI and HPC workloads."
