Around the world, artificial intelligence (AI) is sparking a new era of innovation. With consumer and enterprise adoption soaring, demand for AI-ready hardware is at an all-time high. Successful AI requires the ability to perform many calculations simultaneously, a task performed by highly parallel processors. The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), originally designed for rendering graphics, is the ideal hardware for AI and machine learning and crucial for training and inference.
SharonAI is a High-Performance Computing (HPC) business focused on Artificial Intelligence Cloud GPU Compute Infrastructure, operating across the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. The company is already supporting organizations in higher education and the public sector and realized that helping them fast track their AI initiatives offered a significant business opportunity. SharonAI turned to Lenovo to make this plan a reality, using Lenovo TruScale IaaS to ramp up its compute resources to deliver an attractive new GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering.
For start-ups and research organizations, AI has never been more important. But such organizations typically don’t have the budget for high-end GPU-accelerated servers, which are much sought-after in today’s AI-hungry world. Seeing that research organizations urgently needed capacity for traditional HPC or AI workloads, SharonAI founder and COO Andrew Leece realized there was a clear gap in the market. SharonAI hoped to make infrastructure for AI more accessible by expanding its service offering to include GPUaaS, working with marketplaces and customers to address the supply-and-demand imbalance.
Leece said, “There is such huge demand for GPUs now and into the foreseeable future, but a real shortage of supply. Our goal is to fill the gap in the market for accessible, affordable, on-demand GPU resources for AI. That’s where our GPUaaS offering comes in.”
SharonAI looked at several options to deliver access to GPUs for its public sector, research and start-up clients, and found that Lenovo was able to bring considerable expertise to the relationship. TruScale IaaS enabled SharonAI to scale its offering rapidly without up-front costs.
Complimentary approach
SharonAI – then Distributed Storage Solutions (DSS) – started working with Lenovo to provide the hardware underpinning its existing storage service in 2021. As one of Australia’s largest cloud storage providers, it offers customers a simple alternative to object-based storage with content delivery network-like performance at a fraction of the price of the hyperscalers. It allows users to store data in several ways, including across multiple nodes or geographically diverse locations, and is attractive to budget-conscious organizations with large object storage needs. SharonAI’s existing customer base includes many organizations in education and independent research, which is where it decided to focus when it came to delivering AI-ready hardware.
As a start-up establishing itself as a trusted data storage provider, the flexibility of Lenovo’s TruScale IaaS solution meant that SharonAI was able to deliver infrastructure which could perform well under demanding customer workloads, but was also easy to monitor, maintain and manage. SharonAI was able to procure millions of dollars of equipment every year without having to continually raise capital.
SharonAI aimed to ramp up the compute resource service it offered for HPC and AI workloads, but challenges remained, specifically around how to scale the company’s offering of GPU-dense servers over a relatively short period, without large-scale upfront investment. With a plan to deploy hundreds of servers, the flexibility of Lenovo’s TruScale IaaS enabled DSS to offer customers access to the GPUs they needed. SharonAI was able to access cutting-edge hardware such as the NVIDIA H100 and L40S GPU via Lenovo’s TruScale pay-as-you-go model, meaning it could get started without significant upfront costs.
The first phase consisted of AMD-based Lenovo ThinkSystem SR675 V3 servers, offering customers on-demand access to the latest state-of-the-art NVIDIA H100 and L40S GPUs for AI training and inference. Lenovo TruScale offers tech leaders easier ways to manage IT, taking care of buying, deploying and scaling without incremental capital expenditure. For SharonAI, this freed the company to focus on its long-term strategy of expanding into the AI space.
“As demand for AI services increases, companies like SharonAI need new ways to respond with speed and ease. With Lenovo TruScale IaaS, we wanted to make it easier for organizations to incorporate AI into their own offerings in a scalable, flexible and cost-effective way. SharonAI is a great example of this. Using Lenovo TruScale IaaS, it has been able to scale and expand its platform with an innovative new GPU-as-a-Service offering to address the changing needs of its customers,” said Dale Aultman, Vice President & General Manager, Hybrid Cloud Services at Lenovo.
The idea came to SharonAI after a meeting with Lenovo almost a year ago, Leece explains. He says, “It was during a visit to Lenovo’s Executive Briefing Center in Raleigh, North Carolina, that I first thought about pivoting our business to GPUaaS. Learning about Lenovo’s AI innovation ecosystem planted the seed in my mind, and the support we’ve had from the global and local teams to design the solution as we expand our compute service offering has been excellent.”
With the help of Lenovo, SharonAI realized the opportunities in providing GPUaaS to research institutes and other clients and learned about the environmental and cost benefits of different solutions. SharonAI worked closely with Lenovo’s AI and HPC advisory team to design a solution, first producing a business case and then placing an order, with help from Lenovo’s regional pre-sales team.
Riding the wave
The momentum behind the worldwide AI boom shows no sign of slowing, and SharonAI is well-placed to meet the expanding demand, thanks to Lenovo TruScale, which offers devices, infrastructure, services, and solutions that scale to business needs.
“AI is the future, and every organization is going to want to harness its power in some way,” says Leece. “I see this every day: nine out of the 16 businesses in our office building are AI startups. They’re going to need infrastructure to train their AI models, but don’t have the budget – or the desire – to purchase, operate and maintain their own servers. Lenovo will be a key enabler for our expansion plans.”
Leece says SharonAI has acquired a Tier 3 data center which it is reprovisioning to support several megawatts of compute including direct to chip water cooling. This will pave the way for the company’s further expansion into AI in the US and Australia.
Leece says, “The biggest advantage that Lenovo offers us that no other vendor on the market does is the TruScale program. It gives us the freedom to scale our GPU infrastructure – the most essential element to high performance AI deployments, in proportion to demand. The result is greater availability of GPUs just-in-time, no penalty for fluctuating demand, providing elasticity without the need for inventory buildup. Because this is delivered as a Service, Lenovo monitors and manages the infrastructure leaving us free to focus on customer needs.”
Visit https://techtoday.lenovo.com/gb/en/truscale to learn more about Lenovo TruScale.