The infrastructure powering IBM's Gen AI model development

TL;DR

This paper describes IBM's hybrid cloud infrastructure, Vela and Blue Vela, designed to support large-scale generative AI model training with high performance, flexibility, and future-proofing, integrating hardware, software, and telemetry.

Contribution

It introduces IBM's integrated AI infrastructure solutions, Vela and Blue Vela, optimized for scalable, efficient, and adaptable large-scale AI model training.

Findings

Vela offers scalable, distributed AI training capabilities.

Blue Vela enables rapid development of large AI models.

The infrastructure supports both internal innovation and commercial deployment.

Abstract

AI Infrastructure plays a key role in the speed and cost-competitiveness of developing and deploying advanced AI models. The current demand for powerful AI infrastructure for model training is driven by the emergence of generative AI and foundational models, where on occasion thousands of GPUs must cooperate on a single training job for the model to be trained in a reasonable time. Delivering efficient and high-performing AI training requires an end-to-end solution that combines hardware, software and holistic telemetry to cater for multiple types of AI workloads. In this report, we describe IBM's hybrid cloud infrastructure that powers our generative AI model development. This infrastructure includes (1) Vela: an AI-optimized supercomputing capability directly integrated into the IBM Cloud, delivering scalable, dynamic, multi-tenant and geographically distributed infrastructure for large-scale model training and other AI workflow steps and (2) Blue Vela: a large-scale, purpose-built, on-premises hosting environment that is optimized to support our largest and most ambitious AI model training tasks. Vela provides IBM with the dual benefit of high performance for internal use along with the flexibility to adapt to an evolving commercial landscape. Blue Vela provides us with the benefits of rapid development of our largest and most ambitious models, as well as future-proofing against the evolving model landscape in the industry. Taken together, they provide IBM with the ability to rapidly innovate in the development of both AI models and commercial offerings.