Monday, October 5, 2020

NVIDIA envisions EDGE AI with servers under Fleet Command service

NVIDIA announced growing momentum for its EGX edge AI platform, bringing a new wave of secure, GPU-accelerated software, services and servers to enterprise and edge data centers. The company cites traction from  AI, 5G, CloudRAN, security and networking companies who are teaming with major server manufacturers, including Dell Technologies, Inspur, Lenovo and Supermicro, as well as leading software infrastructure providers, including Canonical, Cloudera, Red Hat, SUSE and VMware, to leverage the NVIDIA EGX platform in edge applications.

NVIDIA also announced that the EGX platform is expanding to combine the NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPU and BlueField-2 DPU capabilities on a single PCIe card, giving enterprises a common platform to build secure, accelerated data centers. BlueField-2 DPUs include powerful Arm CPU cores that can be used to create a trusted enclave for AI inference models running on the GPU.

“Companies around the world will come to use AI to improve virtually every aspect of their business,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, who unveiled the news in his keynote at the GPU Technology Conference. “To support this massive shift, NVIDIA has created an accelerated computing platform that helps companies modernize their data centers and deploy AI anywhere.”

Servers in many locations

Rather than having 10,000 servers in one location, future enterprise data centers will have one or more servers across 10,000 different locations, including inside office buildings, factories, warehouses, cell towers, schools, stores and banks.

To simplify and secure the deployment and management of AI applications and models on these servers at scale, NVIDIA will offer a new service called NVIDIA Fleet Command with a unified control plane to centralize the management of servers spread across vast areas, including factories, hospitals, retail stores and even city streets. Fleet Command promises one-touch provisioning, over-the-air software updates, remote management and detailed monitoring dashboards for AI applications.