Skip to content

Cloud-native teams level up with ML accelerators#

Audience Aware is a hypothetical cloud-native adtech startup offering high-cardinality insights into a brand's digital audience.

Audience Aware uses Spark to process its data.

The team considers three hardware accelerators for its Spark workloads:

First Deployment#

Working with Rolling Stock, Audience Aware tests their workload on the following deployment:

US-West#

  • 2x Rack Units with Provided Hardware - $1950 MRC each for six months

    • 1x 16c AMD Zen 6, 128GB RAM, 1x 100Gbps, 2x NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000
    • A/B availability
    • Rolling Stock will source RTX PROs for the project

  • 2x Rack Units with Provided Hardware - $1850 MRC each for six months

    • 1x 16c AMD Zen 6, 128GB RAM, 1x 100Gbps, 1x Speedata C200
    • A/B availability
    • C200s provided by Speedata for evaluation; not included in MRC

  • 1x Highly Available Yard Router - $784 MRC

    • 2Gbps with burst capacity
    • 1x Additional VLAN
    • 1x hyperscale site-to-site connection (free)

  • 1x Non-Highly Available Yard Tower - $50 MRC

    • 1vCPU
  • Total MRC: $8434
  • Total term: six months

The evaluation shows that Speedata C200s offer an advantage for Audience Aware's Spark workloads.

With the evaluation complete, Audience Aware plans a longer-term deployment for its first production release.

Second Deployment#

Working with Rolling Stock, Audience Aware deploys the following:

US-West#

  • 10x Rack Units with Provided Hardware - US-West - $1650 MRC each for 18 months

    • 1x 16c AMD Zen 6, 128GB RAM, 1x 100Gbps, 1x Speedata C200
    • A/B availability
    • C200s sourced by Rolling Stock and delivered as a service

  • 1x Highly Available Yard Router - US-West - $4754 MRC

    • 12Gbps with burst capacity
    • 1x Additional VLAN
    • 1x hyperscale site-to-site connection (free)

  • 1x Highly Available Yard Tower - US-West - $196 MRC

    • 2vCPU

US-Central#

  • 10x Rack Units with Provided Hardware - US-Central - $1650 MRC each for 18 months

    • 1x 16c AMD Zen 6, 128GB RAM, 1x 100Gbps, 1x Speedata C200
    • A/B availability
    • C200s sourced by Rolling Stock and delivered as a service

  • 1x Highly Available Yard Router - US-Central - $4754 MRC

    • 12Gbps with burst capacity
    • 1x Additional VLAN
    • 1x hyperscale site-to-site connection (free)

  • 1x Highly Available Yard Tower - US-Central - $196 MRC

    • 2vCPU

Total MRC: $42,900

Audience Aware estimates that running these workloads on commodity hyperscale infrastructure without optimized hardware would cost five to seven times as much, even with a term discount.

With the new hardware, Audience Aware can build products that were previously out of reach.