Cisco builds an AI server powered by NVIDIA

Cisco announced a new server in its UCS product family designed for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The new Cisco UCS C480 ML server speeds up deep learning, a compute-intensive form of machine learning that uses neural networks and large data sets to train computers for complex tasks, by integrating NVIDIA's Tesla V100 Tensor Core GPUs.

"Over the next few years, apps powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning will become mainstream in the enterprise. While this will solve many complex business issues, it will also create new challenges for IT," said Roland Acra, SVP and GM for Cisco's Data Center Business Group. "Today's powerful addition to the Cisco UCS lineup will power AI initiatives across a wide range of industries. Our early-access customers in the financial sector are exploring ways to improve fraud detection and enhance algorithmic trading. Meanwhile in healthcare, they're interested in better insights and diagnostics, improving medical image classification, and speeding drug

"We believe the power of machine learning should be available for all organizations, whether in the cloud or on-premises, and we're excited to continue our collaborative efforts with Cisco," said David Aronchick, Product Manager at Google Cloud. "We're pleased to see Cisco creating hybrid cloud solutions for machine learning, and also contributing code to the Google-led open source project, Kubeflow.  Organizations running Kubeflow on the new UCS C480 deep learning server will benefit from consistent machine learning tools that work great both on-premises and on Google Cloud."