Micron SSDs earn qualification for Nvidia recommended vendor list.

Micron Technology, Inc. announced on October 23, 2024 that its 9550 PCIe Gen5 E1.S data center SSDs have been added to the NVIDIA recommended vendor list (RVL) for the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 system and its derivatives. The GB200 NVL72 uses the GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip to deliver rack-scale, energy-efficient AI infrastructure. The enablement of PCIe Gen5 storage in the system makes the Micron 9550 SSD an ideal fit for optimizing performance and power efficiency in AI workloads including large-scale training of AI models, real-time trillion-parameter language model inference, and high-performance computing (HPC) tasks.

The Micron 9550 delivers significant performance advantages compared with other industry offerings. The SSD delivers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect (GDS) and up to 33% faster workload completion times in graph neural network (GNN) training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM). In terms of energy efficiency, the Micron 9550 SSD consumes 81% less SSD energy per 1TB transferred than other SSD offerings with NVIDIA Magnum IO GDS and demonstrates up to 43% lower SSD power in GNN training with BaM.

Jeremy Werner, corporate vice president and general manager of Micron's Storage Business Unit, stated: "Micron's memory and storage products play a critical role in meeting the growing requirements of demanding AI workloads from the data center to the edge. By integrating the Micron 9550 SSD on the GB200 NVL72, server companies can integrate a high-performance, energy-efficient Gen5 data center storage solution into their AI server systems." Keith Morris, vice president of Product Management at NVIDIA, added: "Ultra-fast and energy-efficient NVMe storage is crucial to the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 rack-scale design. The Micron 9550 SSD can be integrated by our solution partners into their systems based on the GB200 NVL72 reference architecture to enable higher performance and efficiency."

In addition to the Micron 9550 PRO PCIe Gen5 in 3.84TB, 7.68TB, and 15.36TB E1.S capacities, the Micron 7450 PRO 3.84TB E1.S and 1.92TB M.2 SSDs have also been listed on the NVIDIA RVL. Micron is working closely with server ODMs and OEMs to qualify the Micron 9550 and 7450 SSDs into their NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 solutions. The NVIDIA GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip will also ship with Micron's LPDDR5X memory to provide high capacity, low power, and enhanced RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) capabilities for AI server infrastructure.