NVIDIA announced some exciting developments in the field of enterprise AI, deep learning and supercomputing at the GTC Spring 2021. GTC, conducted virtually this year, is an annual conference that showcases some of the most transformative technologies in AI, graphics, data centre, computing, networking, and more. Here are a few highlights from the first day’s event.
Omniverse Enterprise – Fostering Enterprise Collaboration
NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise makes it possible for 3D production teams — which are often large, diverse in skills and geographically dispersed — to work seamlessly together on complex projects. With Omniverse, designers, artists and reviewers can work simultaneously in a virtual world from anywhere, on any device.
“Every few decades, technologies converge to enable a whole new thing – Omniverse is such an invention,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA in his keynote address.
“The immediate applications of Omniverse are incredible, from connecting design teams for remote collaboration to simulating digital twins of factories and robots. The science-fiction metaverse is near,” he added.
Jarvis – Innovation in Conversational AI
NVIDIA claimed that their Jarvis models offer highly accurate automatic speech recognition, as well as superhuman language understanding, real-time translations for multiple languages, and new text-to-speech capabilities to create expressive conversational AI agents.
“Conversational AI is in many ways the ultimate AI,” Huang said. “Deep learning breakthroughs in speech recognition, language understanding and speech synthesis have enabled engaging cloud services. NVIDIA Jarvis brings this state-of-the-art conversational AI out of the cloud for customers to host AI services anywhere.”
NVIDIA Jarvis will enable a new wave of language-based applications previously not possible, improving interactions with humans and machines. It opens the door to the creation of such services as digital nurses to help monitor patients around the clock, relieving overloaded medical staff; online assistants to understand what consumers are looking for and recommend the best products; and real-time translations to improve cross-border workplace collaboration and enable viewers to enjoy live content in their own language.
AI Enterprise – Making Enterprise Servers Smarter
NVIDIA introduced a new class of NVIDIA-Certified System, bringing AI within reach for organizations that run their applications on industry-standard enterprise data center infrastructure.
These include high-volume enterprise servers from top manufacturers, which were announced in January and are now certified to run the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, which is exclusively certified for VMware vSphere 7, a leading compute virtualization platform.
“AI is rapidly moving into mainstream use, accelerating demand for the infrastructure and software businesses require deploying it at scale,” said Manuvir Das, head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere 7 on NVIDIA-Certified Systems, customers can now run virtualized AI applications on industry-standard servers — enabling hundreds of thousands of companies to host new AI services on their VMware platforms.”
NVIDIA and VMware’s collaboration provides customers an AI-ready enterprise platform to accelerate AI, container-based and traditional enterprise workloads, while also supporting virtualized AI applications with scale-out performance that is nearly indistinguishable from bare-metal servers.
“Customers don’t want AI silos – they want to run AI apps on their enterprise infrastructure for manageability, scalability, security and governance,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware.
“VMware and NVIDIA have teamed up so that customers can now evolve their existing enterprise infrastructure with an end-to-end AI-Ready Enterprise platform that’s easy to deploy and operate.”
Alps – Most Powerful Supercomputer
In collaboration with the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NVIDIA announced Alps, which is touted to be the world’s most powerful AI-capable supercomputer aimed at large scale research work.
“Today’s monumental scientific challenges demand a new kind of supercomputer to fuel discovery,” said Huang.
“Taking advantage of our new Grace CPU designed for giant-scale AI and HPC, CSCS and NVIDIA are joining together to blaze a new trail — building a world-class, Arm-based supercomputing infrastructure that will let leading scientists apply the power of AI to do world-changing research,” he said adding that Alps will be available from 2023.
Stay tuned for more updates from GTC 2021
