Nvidia developing new service to track GPU health, location

updated Nvidia is developing a new inventory management service that could be used by customers to verify the location of their existing GPU stockpiles.

The existence of the service, which has yet to be officially announced, was first reported on by Reuters on Wednesday. However, location verification isn’t the platform’s intended purpose but rather a secondary benefit, and customers would need to opt in to use it, El Reg has since learned.

Instead, the software platform, which would be offered by Nvidia as a managed service, is designed to provide streaming telemetry on the health of customers’ GPU fleets in order to minimize failures and maximize uptime.

The mechanism for verifying the location of the accelerators isn’t particularly sophisticated. From what we understand, it’s essentially the equivalent of running a ping and comparing the response time to a lookup table to see whether it’s within the expected range. 

This kind of infrastructure monitoring and management service isn’t uncommon in modern datacenters. For example, this class of software might use telemetry to identify a failing component and flag the system or contain it for…