AMD & Red Hat Strengthen Alliance to Transform Data Centres

Red Hat and AMD have announced a significant expansion of their strategic collaboration, focusing on propelling AI infrastructure progress forward.

The partnership, revealed at Red Hat Summit, aims to deliver solutions for organisations struggling to balance traditional IT systems with the growing demands of AI workloads. By deepening their alliance, both companies are eager to expand their customer choices across the hybrid cloud, from deploying optimised AI models, to more cost-effectively modernising traditional virtual machines (VMs).

Notably, this includes AMD Instinct GPUs, which are now fully enabled on Red Hat OpenShift AI, providing processing power for AI deployments across hybrid cloud environments.

“Fully realising the benefits of AI means that organisations must have the choice and flexibility to optimise their IT footprint for the rigors of scaling demand,” says Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. 

“Our extended collaboration with AMD expands the spectrum of options for organisations seeking to ready their IT environments for an ever-evolving future, from modernising existing investments on a high-performing CPU architecture and virtualisation platform to preparing for production AI with next-generation hardware accelerators and open source AI technologies.”

Bolstering architecture to drive more efficient Gen AI

As workload demand continues to rise across the data centre, particularly because of the global AI boom, organisations need the capacity and resources to meet these requirements.

The average data centre is dedicated primarily to traditional IT systems, but this leaves little room to support intensive AI workloads. To cater to this need, both companies are using Red Hat’s open source solutions and AMD’s high-performance computing (HPC) portfolio.

AMD’s x86-based processors and GPU architectures will be combined with Red Hat AI to support optimised, cost-efficient and production-ready environments.

Testing conducted by the companies on Microsoft Azure ND MI300X v5 demonstrated successful AI inferencing for both small and large language models (LLMs) deployed across multiple GPUs on a single virtual machine. It also reduces the need to deploy across multiple VMs and reduces performance costs.

The companies are also working together in the upstream vLLM community to drive performance acceleration and tuning capabilities, with three main focus areas identified in their announcement.

First, they aim to improve performance on AMD GPUs by upstreaming the AMD kernel library and optimising components like the Triton kernel and FP8. Second, they plan to enhance multi-GPU support by improving collective communication and optimising multi-GPU workloads. Third, they intend to expand vLLM ecosystem engagement through cross-collaboration with industry partners such as IBM.

This can help improve the performance and return on investment (ROI) of each GPU server for even the most demanding of AI workloads.

Advancing the modern data centre

By optimising existing data centre footprints, organizations can more effectively and easily reinvest resources to enable AI innovation. 

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift, is designed to offer a streamlined path for organisations to migrate and manage VM workloads with the simplicity and speed of a cloud-native application platform. 

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation is validated for AMD EPYC processors that are capable of leveraging the AMD EPYC processors’ high level of performance and power efficiency, wherever needed on the hybrid cloud, to create a pathway to a cloud-enabled future. 

When refreshing legacy data centres, this approach could stand to enable high infrastructure consolidation ratios that could lead to lower total cost of ownership for hardware, software licensing and energy.

For data centre executives facing pressure to accommodate AI workloads while maintaining existing systems, the partnership potentially offers a pathway to optimise current infrastructure while preparing for future AI innovations.

“As enterprise customer workloads grow more diverse and demanding, they require solutions that can scale,” says Philip Guido, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at AMD. 

“By combining Red Hat’s industry-leading open source platforms with world-class AMD Instinct GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs, we’re delivering the performance and efficiency customers demand to accelerate AI, virtualization and hybrid-cloud innovation.”

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