Google expands AI infrastructure with Lustre & C4N

Google Cloud has moved its Managed Lustre storage service into general availability and has also made its C4N network- and storage-optimised virtual machines generally available. The updates are part of a broader monthly round-up of additions to Google's AI infrastructure portfolio. Managed Lustre is offered in four performance tiers, ranging from 125 MB/s to 1000 MB/s per TiB of capacity, and can scale to 8 PB of storage. The service uses DDN's EXAScaler technology. C4N is Google's first virtual machine series designed specifically for network- and block storage-heavy workloads. The machines use 5th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Google's Titanium hardware. Google cited 400 Gbps network bandwidth, 95 million packets per second and up to 25 GiB/s of block storage throughput when used with Hyperdisk Extreme. Google also raised the upper size limit for standard Google Kubernetes Engine clusters using Dataplane V2 with network policies enabled. The service now supports clusters of up to 15,000 nodes, a scale aimed at large corporate, AI and machine learning deployments. A co-operative time-slicing feature in llm-d allows reinforcement learning workloads to interleave separate jobs on shared physical systems, raising accelerator duty cycles from about 40% to 70% without affecting model convergence or accuracy. Google has also open-sourced k8s-aibom, a Kubernetes controller intended to identify AI runtimes running in container clusters and create CycloneDX machine learning bills of materials.