As enterprises race to roll out artificial intelligence, often overlookModel training requires extensive computational and GPU resources. When training models on AWS, loading data from S3 often becomes a major bottleneck, wasting valuable GPU cycles. Optimizing data loading can greatly reduce GPU idle time and increase GPU utilization.
In this webinar, Greg Palmer will discuss best practices for efficient data loading during model training on AWS. He will demonstrate how to use Alluxio on EKS as a distributed cache to accelerate PyTorch training jobs that read datasets from S3. This architecture significantly improves the utilization of GPUs from 30% to 90%+, archives ~5x faster training, and lower cloud storage costs.
What you will learn:
- The challenges of feeding data-hungry GPUs in the cloud
- How to accelerate model training by optimizing data loading on AWS
- The reference architecture for running PyTorch jobs with Alluxio cache on EKS while reading data from S3, with benchmark results of training ResNet50 and BERT
- How to use TensorBoard to identify bottlenecks in GPU utilization
As enterprises race to roll out artificial intelligence, often overlookModel training requires extensive computational and GPU resources. When training models on AWS, loading data from S3 often becomes a major bottleneck, wasting valuable GPU cycles. Optimizing data loading can greatly reduce GPU idle time and increase GPU utilization.
In this webinar, Greg Palmer will discuss best practices for efficient data loading during model training on AWS. He will demonstrate how to use Alluxio on EKS as a distributed cache to accelerate PyTorch training jobs that read datasets from S3. This architecture significantly improves the utilization of GPUs from 30% to 90%+, archives ~5x faster training, and lower cloud storage costs.
What you will learn:
- The challenges of feeding data-hungry GPUs in the cloud
- How to accelerate model training by optimizing data loading on AWS
- The reference architecture for running PyTorch jobs with Alluxio cache on EKS while reading data from S3, with benchmark results of training ResNet50 and BERT
- How to use TensorBoard to identify bottlenecks in GPU utilization
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Amazon S3 and other cloud object stores have become the de facto storage system for organizations large and small. And it’s no wonder why. Cloud object stores deliver unprecedented flexibility with unlimited capacity that scales on demand and ensures data durability out-of-the-box at unbeatable prices.
Yet as workloads shift toward real-time AI, inference, feature stores, and agentic memory systems, S3’s latency and limited semantics begin to show their limits. In this webinar, you’ll learn how to augment — rather than replace — S3 with a tiered architecture that restores sub-millisecond performance, richer semantics, and high throughput — all while preserving S3’s advantages of low-cost capacity, durability, and operational simplicity.
We’ll walk through:
- The key challenges posed by latency-sensitive, semantically rich workloads (e.g. feature stores, RAG pipelines, write-ahead logs)
- Why “just upgrading storage” isn’t sufficient — the bottlenecks in metadata, object access latency, and write semantics
- How Alluxio transparently layers on top of S3 to provide ultra-low latency caching, append semantics, and zero data migration with both FSx-style POSIX access and S3 API access
- Real-world results: achieving sub-ms TTFB, 90%+ GPU utilization in ML training, 80X faster feature store query response times, and dramatic cost savings from reduced S3 operations
- Trade-offs, deployment patterns, and best practices for integrating this tiered approach in your AI/analytics stack
Pratik Mishra delivered insights on architecting scalable, deployable, and resilient AI infrastructure at scale. His discussion on fault tolerance, checkpoint optimization, and the democratization of AI compute through AMD's open ecosystem resonated strongly with the challenges teams face in production ML deployments.
In this talk, Bin Fan, VP of Technology at Alluxio, presents on building tiered architectures that bring sub-millisecond latency to S3-based workloads. The comparison showing Alluxio's 45x performance improvement over S3 Standard and 5x over S3 Express One Zone demonstrated the critical role the performance & caching layer plays in modern AI infrastructure.