Johannesburg, South Africa//— Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, and SoftBank Corp. (SoftBank) have announced the implementation of AI-RAN to optimise power consumption and networking performance using Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes.
With this collaboration, Red Hat and SoftBank are addressing many of the long-standing RAN implementation challenges that service providers often face, such as balancing user demands with energy costs, resource availability and managing deterministic and distributed workloads.
By bringing together AI and RAN on a common platform, Red Hat OpenShift, service providers can dynamically adjust network parameters to meet changing demand and streamline network operations for higher agility.
SoftBank is working with Red Hat to develop AITRAS – an integrated AI and RAN solution built on Red Hat OpenShift. AITRAS provides an enhanced network orchestration and optimisation solution that can support virtualised RAN and AI-enabled applications alike, enabling service providers to operate diverse applications with greater consistency and flexibility.
Additionally, SoftBank is working with Red Hat to use community-driven technologies, like Kepler, an open-source project founded by Red Hat, to help service providers reduce energy costs by more accurately capturing and acting upon power-use metrics from applications.
The power monitoring capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift are derived from Kepler, which exposes key metrics at the cluster level to probe key performance counters and other system statistics.
These metrics can then be fed into SoftBank’s AITRAS orchestrator to help even out power consumption across disparate sites and optimise energy. Using Red Hat OpenShift and its power monitoring capabilities, AITRAS can help service providers to:
- Optimise the placement of compute- and GPU-intensive workloads according to power consumption metrics to maximise energy usage across disparate environments, while still maintaining enhanced performance.
- Enable lightweight measuring using Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, via extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) for kernel-level data collection, to help reduce overhead and improve energy efficiency.
- Achieve more precise GPU energy calculations for both Linux processes and Kubernetes pods using enhanced observability capabilities with Red Hat OpenShift and Kepler, enabling service providers to pinpoint granularities across multi-instance GPU (MIG) and various GPU devices.
Supporting Quotes
Chris Wright, chief technology officer and senior vice president, of Global Engineering, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat and SoftBank are committed to supporting the future of 5G and 6G use cases by bringing the combined power of AI and RAN to network orchestration and optimisation.
With Red Hat OpenShift as a common platform, AI-RAN offers a pioneering approach to network operations for service providers to harness AI for improved resource efficiency and more sustainable power consumption, as well as supporting AI-enabled workloads across network environments.”
Ryuji Wakikawa, vice president and head of the Research Institute of Advanced Technology, SoftBank Corp. said: “Electricity and telecommunications services continue to grow as critical infrastructure that supports society.
By monitoring and predicting power consumption, ‘AITRAS’ optimises equipment from an energy efficiency perspective while reducing risks through distributed deployment. The integration of telecommunications and power infrastructure paves the way for the future of AI-driven infrastructure.”
