Cisco Rolls Out UCS Server for AI, Machine Learning

Cisco Systems is adding to its converged infrastructure lineup a system aimed at the fast-growing and compute-intensive artificial intelligence and machine learning market. Company officials on Sept. 10 unveiled the UCS C480 ML rack server, a system designed to accelerate deep learning workloads powered not only by two Intel "Skylake" Scalable Processors but also eight Tesla V100 GPUs from Nvidia that are connected by the chip maker's NVLink interconnect. The system also comes with up to 24 disk drives offering up to 182TB of storage and up to six NVMe drives. Plus, it can support up to four 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches. The tightly integrated offering will address the challenges facing enterprises as they try to drive competitive advantages from the massive amounts of data they're generating, according to Cisco officials.