Telecommunications Industry HPC Cluster Introduction

What High-Performence Applications and Needs Are There in Telecommunications?

The telecommunication industry puts up high-performance, low-latency and high-throughput needs for high-speed data transmission, high-capacity data storage, high-bandwidth video streaming, and real-time communication. These applications in telecommunications require high-performance networks and infrastructure to ensure reliable and secure data transmission.

AI-Enabled Telecom
Analyze Massive Amounts of Data.
Improve User Experience, and Discover New Services.
Build Business Layouts with Digital Twins.

AI-on-5G
Extending AI to Edge Computing.
Robotics, Automated Guided Vehicles, Drones, Wireless Cameras, Self-checkout via 5G.

Telecom Edge Services
Transforming Traditional Service Models to Deliver Higher Value Solutions with AI.

Accelerated Networking
Faster Packet Processing.
Achieve Software-Defined Networking with DPU.
Increased Efficiency & Deployment Flexibility.

What Software Stacks Are Typically Used in Telecommunications HPC Cluster?

Telecommunications HPC clusters typically used software stacks include distributed computing frameworks such as Apache Spark, distributed databases such as MongoDB, and distributed messaging systems such as Apache Kafka. Additionally, to build high-performance general-purpose AI workload clusters, many telecommunications HPC clusters use specialized software as follows:

• NVIDIA Riva Conversational AI
• NVIDIA Merlin Recommendation System
• NVIDIA Omniverse Digital Twins
• NVIDIA Rapids Accelerated Data
• Apache Spark ETL tool
• DL Framework Deep Learning Framework
• CUDA-X DOCA
  

What Hardware Are Typically Used in Telecommunications HPC Cluster?

In addition to high-performance servers, storage systems, and InfiniBand networking interconnect products (routers, switches, NICs, cables & optical modules), many telecommunications HPC clusters use specialized hardware in data center such as FPGAs and GPUs to accelerate certain tasks. For HPC computing and storage devices, vendors such as Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and HPE are popular choices. For HPC optical connect assemblies, on the other hand, Mellanox was popular and usually the only choice in the past.

Here are some hardware recommendations for telecom AI data mining & edge computing, low-latency access and RDMA support, and InfiniBand cluster connectivity needs.

Need AI Data Mining & Edge Computing?
Recommended GPUs: NVIDIA A100/A30/A40/A10

Need Low-latency Access to Storage, and Supports for GPUDirect RDMA & Software-Defined Network?
Use high-performance NVIDIA InfiniBand NICs/DPUs.

Need Connectivity Assemblies to Build Low-Latency and High-Performance InfiniBand Cluster?
Use 200Gb/s HDR InfiniBand active optical cables/passive copper cables/transceivers.