Full-stack AI infrastructure solutions are having a moment. And why not. Organizations choose these solutions to speed GPU operations, ensure efficient GPU utilization, and enforce security and compliance at scale.
One such solution is k0rdent AI, a turnkey, production-ready “super control plane” for managing complex AI environments. K0rdent automates provisioning, life-cycle management, and orchestration of infrastructure and core services.
The company behind k0rdent is Mirantis Inc. It’s privately held and based in Campbell, Calif. Founded in 2011, Mirantis today has over 800 employees.
Importantly, Mirantis is also a contributor to Kubernetes, the open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Containerization is a software-deployment process that creates a single software package, known as a container, that can run on all types of devices and operating systems.
Mirantis helps organizations achieve digital self-determination by giving them complete control over their strategic infrastructure. The company’s customers include such well-known brands as Adobe, DocuSign and PayPal.
Could Supermicro benefit from the solution’s capabilities? To find out, Supermicro recently validated its modular server architecture with k0rdent.
Testing, Testing
For the validation, Supermicro used two of its own systems:
- A Supermicro 8U GPU server (model AS -8126GS-TNMR) powered by dual AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs and up to eight AMD Instinct MI325X GPUs.
- A Supermicro 2U Big Twin server (model AS -2124BT-HNTR) powered by dual AMD EPYC 7003 processors.
Validation began at the physical level, where the k0rdent bare-metal operator acts as a bridge between the Kubernetes API and the Supermicro servers. This delivered automated BIOS configuration, firmware updates, RAID orchestration, and deployment of a hardened host OS.
Next, the testing team deployed the AMD GPU Operator via the k0rdent catalog. GPU Operator simplifies the deployment and management of AMD Instinct GPUs with Kubernetes clusters, enabling seamless configuration and operation of GPU-accelerated workloads.
The AMD Network Operator was deployed, too. It's a control component that enables GPU-to-GPU communications in an AI cluster, managing AMD NICs in Kubernetes clusters.
Here was the test configuration:
- Model: AMD/Llama 3.1.8B-Instruct-FP8-KV (an open-source model from GitHub that offers a free installation service)
- Environment: AMD ROCm-optimized vLLM container
- Scope: Single GPU unit performance
The testers used a custom PyTorch script to measure raw compute throughput across different precisions. (PyTorch is an open-source deep learning library.)
Results Delivered
The validation successfully demonstrated the automated provisioning of production-grade Kubernetes clusters on Supermicro bare-metal hardware using k0rdent’s declarative orchestration engine and the Bare Metal Operator (BMO).
k0rdent managed the entire lifecycle of the Supermicro nodes. That went from out-of-band discovery via BMC/IPMI (Baseboard Management Controller/Intelligent Platform Management Interface) and hardware introspection…all the way to automated OS imaging and Kubernetes bootstrapping.
This eliminated manual configuration and hypervisor overhead. It also provided a high-performance, consistent, and repeatable deployment model that adheres to Cluster API (CAPI) standards.
As Supermicro explains, the validation confirms that k0rdent effectively bridges the gap between physical server management and cloud-native agility. That makes it an ideal solution for resource-intensive workloads requiring direct hardware access and deterministic performance on Supermicro infrastructure.
Conclusions
Validating Supermicro hardware with Mirantis k0rdent AI represents a shift from building clusters to composing them.
Enterprises can run their entire portfolios—from legacy apps to cutting-edge LLMs—on a single, unified, bare-metal platform with automatic deployment and comprehensive platform management from the bare metal up.
If you have customers eager to eliminate human error and inconsistencies from the AI deployment and management processes, tell them to check out this solution.
Do More:
- Read the solution brief: Supermicro’s AI clusters get supercharged by Mirantis k0rdent AI
- Learn more about Mirantis
- View tech specs of the two validation systems:
- Explore AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs