Article
HTX, Singtel RE:AI and WEKA Run Sovereign Physical AI at Full Speed
Explore how RE:AI and WEKA engineered a cluster to keep GPUs productive for sovereign physical AI.
10 Nov 2026
3 mins
/insights/htx-singtel-reai-and-weka-run-sovereign-physical-ai-at-full-speedBy RE:AI amd WEKA
HTX is building an AI-enabled, sovereign Home Team. Under the five-year Strategic Partnership for Innovation that HTX renewed with Singtel in February 2026, RE:AI, Singtel Digital InfraCo’s sovereign AI cloud business, provides the AI infrastructure behind HTX’s growing requirements, keeping latency-sensitive applications inside trusted local environments. RE:AI designs and runs the platform end to end, from facility and fabric through GPUs, Paragon platform powered orchestration, tenancy and managed service. NeuralMesh is the data layer inside it.
HTX’s NGINE platform is organised into purpose-built engines that run on RE:AI infrastructure: Physical AI tier, is where robotics and real-time vision models are trained and refined.
The Physical AI clusters are an initial build, designed to scale. Physical AI training streams large multimodal datasets, writes large checkpoints often, and exposes any part of the system that can’t keep up. So the cluster was engineered as a system, not a collection of parts: NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 compute, a ConnectX-8 InfiniBand fabric for GPU-to-GPU traffic, a separate BlueField-3 RoCE fabric for storage, and NeuralMesh as the data layer.
Validated together, that stack delivered 7.7 GB/s of read and 6.0 GB/s of write bandwidth to every GPU with the full fleet running, 155 µs read latency, 29.7 million random read IOPS and 99.49% accelerator utilisation.
GPUs are the most expensive and most constrained resource in any AI platform, and they only create value while they’re working. Every minute a GPU spends waiting on data is training that doesn’t happen, a model that ships later and an insight that arrives late. That is why the useful question isn’t what a storage system peaks at on a datasheet. It’s what storage delivers to every node, and every GPU in that node, when the whole fleet is busy at once. Utilisation is uptime, uptime is work completed, and work completed is the return on the platform. A data layer that keeps GPUs fed turns more of the same compute investment into results. One that stalls charges the cost to every GPU in the job.
The system under test was one of RE:AI’s clusters: multiple racks of NVIDIA GB300 NVL72, served by a single NeuralMesh cluster. Every run was made from inside a tenant network space with NeuralMesh native multitenancy enabled, which is the configuration the platform runs in production.
| Benchmark | Configuration | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Data layer (FIO) | FIO ran directly against the filesystem on the GB300 compute nodes, with 16 CPU cores per node assigned to the NeuralMesh client. Each job used libaio with direct I/O, read or wrote 10 GB and ran for 30 seconds. Jobs were spread across the selected nodes, and results were aggregated per run. Bandwidth tests used 1 MiB sequential I/O with 32 jobs per node. IOPS and latency tests used 4 KB random reads. |
It shows what the data layer can deliver to a node. No model, framework or data loader was in the path, so these are not figures for any single training job. Per-GPU figures are the per-node result divided by the four GPUs in a GB300 compute node. |
| Accelerator utilisation (MLPerf Storage) | Singtel RE:AI ran MLPerf Storage using the MLCommons DLIO harness, which replays a real training job’s I/O pattern without running GPU compute. The test replayed a Unet3D training workload for four simulated accelerators over five epochs on a single node. |
It shows whether the simulated accelerators ever wait on storage. This is an unverified MLPerf Storage result that MLCommons has not reviewed. |
All runs are recorded in RE:AI’s HTX Cluster 1 GB300 NVL72 Handover Report v1.0, 17 August 2026.
| Measure | Single node (4 GPUs) | One rack | Full cluster | Against the standard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sequential read | 46.35 GB/s | 706–714 GB/s | 1.11 TB/s | 1.9x the guideline: 7.7 GB/s per GPU vs. 4 GB/s, with every node running. A single node reaches 93% of its 400 Gb/s storage link. |
| Sequential write | 28.60 GB/s | 531–533 GB/s | 864 GB/s | 3x the guideline: 6.0 GB/s per GPU vs. 2 GB/s, with every node running. Checkpoints finish in a fraction of the time, so GPUs get back to training sooner. |
| Read latency, 4 KB random | 195 µs | 156–157 µs |
155 µs |
Flat from one rack to the full cluster. Latency doesn’t rise as client count grows, so shared load doesn’t slow jobs. |
| Random read IOPS, 4 KB | 1.31 M | 19.9–22.5 M | 29.7 M | About 1.6 M per NeuralMesh node. Ample headroom for data shuffles and metadata-heavy pipelines. |
| Accelerator utilisation, MLPerf Storage (Unet3D) | 99.49% at 24 GB/s sustained | - | - | 99.49% vs. the MLCommons pass threshold of 90%. The accelerators effectively never waited on storage. |
Rack figures show the range across racks, each tested separately. Per-GPU figures are the full-cluster result divided by the cluster’s total GPU count. Backend ceiling at full load: 58.4 GB/s read and 45.5 GB/s write per NeuralMesh storage node.
Each result answers a practical question an operator has to get right when sizing such a platform.
1. Every GPU gets fed with the whole fleet running
2. Peak performance is available to any single node
3. Performance scales predictably
4. Latency stays flat under load
5. The GPUs stayed busy
Shared AI platforms usually force a trade-off. Isolate tenants with dedicated hardware and accept idle capacity, or share infrastructure and accept weaker boundaries and noisy neighbours. For a sovereign platform serving government workloads, neither is good enough.
NeuralMesh runs multitenancy natively inside the cluster. Each tenant is a first-class entity with its own lifecycle, capacity quota, security policies and administrator. Tenants share one elastic resource pool, so capacity one tenant isn’t using is available to others instead of sitting idle, and removing a tenant returns its resources to the pool immediately.
Tenant networks are built as network spaces on WEKA’s Virtualized RDMA Data Fabric (VRDF), which enforces isolation inside the RDMA data plane rather than relying on host-level segmentation alone. In practice, that gives each tenant:
For HTX, the key point is that every benchmark ran with multitenancy enabled. Isolation didn’t cost performance. NGINE Physical AI GPU platform is designed to add tenants over time, and each one can come online in the same cluster without a new storage silo and without sacrificing performance.
HTX’s NGINE platform is organised into purpose-built engines that run on RE:AI infrastructure: Physical AI tier, is where robotics and real-time vision models are trained and refined.
The Physical AI clusters are an initial build, designed to scale. Physical AI training streams large multimodal datasets, writes large checkpoints often, and exposes any part of the system that can’t keep up. So the cluster was engineered as a system, not a collection of parts: NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 compute, a ConnectX-8 InfiniBand fabric for GPU-to-GPU traffic, a separate BlueField-3 RoCE fabric for storage, and NeuralMesh as the data layer.
Validated together, that stack delivered 7.7 GB/s of read and 6.0 GB/s of write bandwidth to every GPU with the full fleet running, 155 µs read latency, 29.7 million random read IOPS and 99.49% accelerator utilisation.
AI I/O is bursty. Checkpoints, epoch boundaries, dataset shuffles and context loads all arrive as short bursts, synchronised across the fleet. A platform sized for the average handles the average, then stalls at every burst. That stall is paid in GPU time on every node in the job, not only the one that’s waiting.
So size for the burst. Calculate how much data the largest job writes at a checkpoint, and how long that job can afford to pause while it does. Here’s what that looks like for one rack. A full-rack job spans 18 nodes and 72 GPUs. Say it writes a 5 TB checkpoint, and every GPU in the job waits until the write finishes.
| Storage write bandwidth for the rack | Time to write a 5 TB checkpoint | GPUs waiting |
|---|---|---|
| 531 GB/s, as measured on this cluster | About 9 seconds (5,000 GB ÷ 531 GB/s) |
72 |
| 144 GB/s, the reference-architecture minimum (72 GPUs × 2 GB/s) | About 35 seconds (5,000 GB ÷ 144 GB/s) |
72 |
The difference is about 25 seconds for 72 GPUs, or roughly 30 GPU-minutes lost at every checkpoint. If the job checkpoints once an hour, that adds up to about 12 GPU-hours a day, per rack, spent waiting instead of training. Sizing for peak gets that time back.
Storage performance at this level is a property of the whole system. A data layer can’t deliver line rate into a node that isn’t set up to receive it, so the two teams divided the work clearly and agreed one approach from the start: design the storage path end to end for maximum throughput per node, then prove every part of it by measurement before handover.
RE:AI owned the compute side: host networking, fabric layout and the configuration of every GPU node. WEKA owned the data layer: deploying and configuring NeuralMesh, mapping its tenant network spaces onto RE:AI’s VLAN design, and running and diagnosing the benchmark programme. These were the decisions that made the difference.
Decision |
What was done | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Separate storage fabric (RE:AI) | Storage traffic runs on each node’s BlueField-3 Ethernet port over RoCE, kept apart from the four ConnectX-8 InfiniBand rails that carry GPU-to-GPU (NCCL) traffic. |
Checkpoint bursts and GPU collectives never compete for the same links. |
| Networking that matches the filesystem (RE:AI and WEKA) | Bonded ports with LACP on the storage path, and one VLAN for each NeuralMesh network space. | Tenant isolation is the same object on the switch, the host and the filesystem, so there is nothing to reconcile and nothing to drift. |
| Dedicated, well-placed client cores (RE:AI and WEKA) | 16 CPU cores on each node reserved for the NeuralMesh client, on the same memory domain (NUMA node) as the storage NIC. GB300 hosts expose 34 NUMA nodes, and data that crosses between them loses bandwidth and gains latency. | Storage I/O doesn’t compete with application CPU, and data takes the shortest path from network to memory. |
| Configuration built into the node image (RE:AI) | NeuralMesh client settings ship in RE:AI’s stateless node image. | Every node boots with identical settings, and none can drift out of tune. |
| Measure, fix, measure again (joint) | The first single-node test returned 37 GB/s read. The teams traced the gap to storage-path configuration and corrected it. | The same node reached 46.35 GB/s, about 93% of its 400 Gb/s port, and the full cluster reached 1.11 TB/s. |
Before the service went live, the teams also swept concurrency from 4 to 16 jobs per node, tested each rack separately and exercised failover.
RE:AI NGINE starts compact, and it’s built to grow. The results from this validation testing indicate how that growth will behave.
For HTX, that means the Physical AI tier can scale on a platform that keeps its most valuable resource, the GPU, doing useful work. For RE:AI, it’s a repeatable blueprint for a regulated, multitenant sovereign AI zone: isolation enforced in the data plane rather than only at the host, a host configuration RE:AI owns and can reproduce on every node, and performance measured on the production configuration rather than by datasheets.
© Singtel AI Infrastructure Pte. Ltd. (UEN: 202414710C). All Rights Reserved.