Many organizations taking advantage of newly available AI technologies are seeking solutions for AI-at-scale, built to address the manageability challenges and productivity barriers by delivering a seamless and flexible end-to-end AI pipeline solution. Crowds at this week’s #GTC19 conference hosted by NVIDIA saw new announcements that moved to satisfy these needs. For example, take Pure Storage’s new offerings:
- Hyperscale AIRI: Architected to deliver supercomputing capabilities for enterprises pioneering real-world AI initiatives, hyper-scale AIRI delivers a simple yet powerful architecture to allow organizations to utilize the true power of AI by eliminating the challenges that prevent organizations from deploying AI-at-scale.
- With NVIDIA GPU Cloud Deep Learning stack and AIRI scaling toolkit, data scientists can begin building applications with containerized AI frameworks and rededicate time to deriving valuable insights from data.
- In addition, integration with Kubernetes and Pure Service Orchestrator means any IT team can deliver an AI-infrastructure with cloud-like elasticity. Hyper-scale AIRI allows enterprises to scale beyond DGX-1 to DGX-2.
- FlashStack for AI: FlashStack for AI, built with Cisco UCS C480ML and Pure Storage FlashBlade, brings AI within reach of customers with traditional analytics. With FlashStack for AI, enterprise IT teams can deliver a simplified, end-to-end AI pipeline with a wide range of Cisco-certified UCS servers to choose from for the entire data pipeline integrated with Pure’s DataHub.
Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG) is a data solutions leader that helps innovators build a better world with data. The company announced a complete portfolio of solutions for any AI initiative, from early inception to large-scale production. An all-new hyperscale configuration of AI-Ready Infrastructure (AIRI) is designed to deliver supercomputing capabilities for enterprises that pioneer real-world AI initiatives and have grown beyond the capabilities of AI-ready solutions available in the market today. Built jointly with the leaders of AI supercomputing, NVIDIA and Mellanox, hyperscale AIRI delivers multiple racks of NVIDIA DGX-1 and DGX-2 systems with both Infiniband and Ethernet fabrics as interconnect options. In addition, Pure Storage announced FlashStackTM for AI, a solution built jointly with Cisco and NVIDIA to bring AI within reach for every enterprise.
AIRI, a comprehensive AI-Ready Infrastructure, is purpose-built to enable data architects, scientists, and business leaders to operationalize AI-at-scale for every enterprise.
Pure Storage’s portfolio of solutions for AI-at-scale enables enterprise IT teams from any organization to deploy AI infrastructure, which gives IT teams the freedom to build applications at a faster rate and achieve improved business outcomes. Pure Storage’s full spectrum of AI solutions, including hyperscale AIRI and FlashStack for AI, is built to address the manageability challenges and productivity barriers by delivering a seamless and flexible end-to-end AI pipeline solution.
Businesses from a variety of industries are discovering that AI is necessary to tackle existing problems and create new opportunities,” said Matt Burr, GM of FlashBlade, Pure Storage. “For example, healthcare organizations from around the world are using AI to bring advancements to treatments and quality of care. AI is complex and in its early stages, which means the solutions built to enable AI must be straightforward and user-friendly. Hyperscale AIRI is designed to bring supercomputing capabilities to pioneers of real-world AI without the complexities that often occur when scaling across multiple racks.”
Hyperscale AIRI, now supporting NVIDIA DGX-2, delivers a simple yet powerful architecture to allow organizations to utilize the true power of AI by eliminating the challenges that prevent organizations from deploying AI-at-scale. With NVIDIA NGC software container registry and AIRI scaling toolkit, data scientists can begin building applications with containerized AI frameworks and rededicate time to deriving valuable insights from data. In addition, integration with Kubernetes and Pure Service Orchestrator means any IT team can deliver an AI-infrastructure with cloud-like elasticity. Hyperscale AIRI allows enterprises to scale beyond NVIDIA DGX-1 to DGX-2.
AI innovators and their IT teams need a faster path to growing infrastructure without the setbacks of design complexity and unexpected performance or operations bottlenecks. Enterprises need a rack-scale infrastructure solution that offers a streamlined, predictable path for growing capacity,” said Tony Paikeday, Director of DGX Systems, NVIDIA. “With hyperscale AIRI, enterprises are getting a simplified solution that accelerates deployments and scales predictably in response to business demand.”
Hyperscale AIRI requires a network compatible with large high-performance computing environments. Mellanox’s high-performance network delivers the industry’s lowest latency and highest bandwidth network for hyperscale AIRI.
We are excited to partner with Pure Storage and NVIDIA to bring hyperscale AIRI to the market,” said Rob Davis, Vice President of Storage Technology, Mellanox. “Building a scalable and high-performance AI infrastructure is one of the toughest challenges faced by our data center customers. Mellanox end-to-end Ethernet and Infiniband interconnect solutions power some of the biggest supercomputers in the world. Hyperscale AIRI integrates the best of breed technologies from Mellanox, Pure Storage and NVIDIA into a reference architecture that can seamlessly scale from a single rack to massive systems.”
FlashStack Delivers AI for Everyone
FlashStack for AI, built with Cisco UCS C480ML and Pure Storage FlashBlade, brings AI within reach of customers with traditional analytics. With FlashStack for AI, enterprise IT teams can deliver a simplified, end-to-end AI pipeline with a wide range of Cisco-certified UCS servers powered by NVIDIA GPU CUDA accelerated AI libraries integrated with Pure Storage’s data hub.
FlashStack is a cutting-edge converged infrastructure designed to deliver outstanding performance and reliability. With the addition of the UCS C480 ML, FlashStack for AI is extending the existing infrastructure to support AI/ML workloads without adding new infrastructure silos,” said Todd Brannon, Senior Director of Product Marketing for UCS Portfolio, Cisco.
AIRI: Compelling Use Cases
Since AIRI was first announced in March 2018, it has gained traction across an assortment of verticals, spanning from healthcare to research and more.
Based in the growing district of Linkou, Taiwan, Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital is the main branch of the Chang Gung Memorial Healthcare System. The hospital is JCI accredited and has trained more than 1,700 practicing physicians from 75 different countries in the last decade. With 29 specialty centers treating over 10,000 local and international patients a year, Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital is one of the most prestigious medical and education centers in Taiwan. Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital specializes in the field Genomics, and with AIRI they are able to extract value from their data quickly and bring impactful innovations to healthcare faster.
With faster access to our large datasets, we are able to quickly identify disease-carrying genes and develop new treatments and preventative measures at a much faster rate,” said Dr. Chi-hung Lin, Associate Research Fellow, Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital. “Our vision is to eventually become a service provider for local medical practitioners by delivering machine learning and deep learning experiences across other hospitals in Taiwan. We’re able to receive the results from our Genomic research much faster with AIRI. With this ability, the amount of information we’ve gathered for local medical providers to use and benefit from has increased.”
German non-profit, UnternehmerTUM, is one of the largest innovation and entrepreneurship centers in Europe. UnternehmerTUM supports AI founders and startups from the start of their journeys all the way to IPO. UnternehmerTUM selected AIRI because they needed a reliable technology infrastructure to support their large data sets.
AIRI is a noteworthy and tightly integrated, innovative solution for a growing demand: Off-the-shelf AI-supercomputing,” said Alexander Waldmann, Operating Director appliedAI Initiative, UnternehmerTUM Projekt GmbH. “With the combination of Pure Storage FlashBlade and NVIDIA DGX-1, we are able to quickly deliver an at-scale platform to our partners. AIRI supports our ability to quickly experiment with AI, learn best practices and challenges involved with AI, and discover new opportunities for positive change.”
Contributed by Daniel D. Gutierrez, Managing Editor and Resident Data Scientist for insideAI News. In addition to being a tech journalist, Daniel also is a consultant in data scientist, author, educator and sits on a number of advisory boards for various start-up companies.
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