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The year 2020 will be remembered for a lot of things, among them a global pandemic, social justice and a historic election. These grabbed center stage because they have huge societal implications. Another big trend in 2020 has been the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). Historically, AI has been used by scientific institutions, big pharma, oil and gas and other data-heavy industries.
Today, all businesses are data-heavy, and AI is being infused into everything and is being made available everywhere. The rise of AI will also have some significant societal changes because it makes everything easier.
AI changes the way we live and work
One of the major AI vendors is graphics processing unit (GPU) market leader, NVIDIA. Developers use its tools and infrastructure to build AI-enabled applications. The company offers products that simplify the process of building AI into services that include speech recognition, conversational AI, data sciences, robotics, inferencing and a whole lot more.
The NVIDIA tools have been widely adopted by AI developers and data scientists, but scaling the use of these to a wider audience will require simplifying the process of accessing the tools. Today, developers need to build on one platform, such as AWS, and then access the AI tools from NVIDIA directly.
AWS, NVIDIA partner to simplify building apps with embedded AI
Recently, NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a partnership by offering an NVIDIA storefront in the AWS Marketplace aimed at simplifying the process of embedding AI capabilities into applications. All totaled, NVIDIA will offer 21 software tools available for free to help developers who use AWS build GPU-accelerated AI apps. This will have a wide range of interest across a number of verticals such as health care, finance, retail, smart cities and more.
NVIDIA has offered GPU-accelerated software through its NVIDIA GPU-optimize cloud (NGC) catalog since 2017 and some individual components on AWS Marketplace. However, this is the first time Nvidia’s entire portfolio will be on AWS Marketplace. The NGC catalog brings NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated software tools together in one place. It houses hundreds of machine learning (ML) frameworks and industry-specific software development kits, which data scientists and developers can use to build AI solutions.
Partnership creates a ‘one-stop shop’
NGC software is containerized and optimized to work on GPU cloud instances such as Amazon EC2 P4d, which is powered by NVIDIA’s newest A100 Tensor Core GPU. Developers get everything they need in a ready-to-run package, so they can run containers in hybrid cloud environments and easily move GPU-accelerated workloads across platforms.
NVIDIA claims 250,000 users have already downloaded more than 1 million AI containers, pre-trained models, application frameworks, Helm charts and other ML resources from the NGC catalog. Some of the most popular NVIDIA GPU-accelerated AI software tools include:
- NVIDIA AI, a suite of frameworks and tools like MXNet and TensorFlow.
- NVIDIA Clara Imaging, a domain-optimized application framework for deep learning training and inference in medical imaging.
- NVIDIA DeepStream SDK, a multiplatform video analytics framework for deployment on the edge and any cloud.
- NVIDIA HPC SDK, a suite of libraries and software tools for high-performance computing.
- NVIDIA Isaac Sim ML Training, a toolkit for robotics ML engineers who generate synthetic images to train an object detection deep neural network.
- NVIDIA Merlin, an open beta framework for building large-scale deep learning recommender systems.
- NVIDIA NeMo, an open-source Python toolkit for building conversation AI models.
- RAPIDS, a suite of open-source data science software libraries.
Through its partnership with AWS, NVIDIA wants to speed up the process of software discovery. Developers will have access to the latest versions of NVIDIA’s AI software with one click as soon as updates are available in the NGC catalog. Another benefit for developers is simpler software deployment. Developers will be able to subscribe and start running NGC software on NVIDIA GPU instances within the AWS console. They’ll also have access to NGC Helm charts for continuous integration and development.
As AI drives breakthroughs in high-performance computing, advanced tools are necessary to help organizations visualize and interact with massive data sets. Alliances like NVIDIA and AWS can take the complexity out of deploying GPU-accelerated software. Rather than spending time searching for the latest frameworks and patches, developers can now access all their resources in one place to build, train and deploy AI apps.
Zeus Kerravala is an eWEEK regular contributor and the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. He spent 10 years at Yankee Group and prior to that held a number of corporate IT positions.