NVIDIA Powers Generative AI Advances

This week NVIDIA announced partnerships with both Dell and Microsoft around generative AI for enterprise applications.

At the Microsoft Build conference, NVIDIA announced that it is integrating its NVIDIA AI Enterprise software into Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning to help enterprises accelerate their AI initiatives.

According to the company, the integration will create a secure, enterprise-ready platform that enables Azure customers to build, deploy and manage customized applications using the more than 100 NVIDIA AI frameworks and tools that come fully supported in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the software layer of NVIDIA’s AI platform.

“With the coming wave of generative AI applications, enterprises are seeking secure accelerated tools and services that drive innovation,” said Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. “The combination of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and Azure Machine Learning will help enterprises speed up their AI initiatives with a straight, efficient path from development to production.”

NVIDIA AI Enterprise on Azure Machine Learning will also provide access to  NVIDIA accelerated computing resources to speed the training and inference of AI models, the company said.

“Microsoft Azure Machine Learning users come to the platform expecting the highest performing, most secure development platform available,” said John Montgomery, corporate vice president of AI platform at Microsoft. “Our integration with NVIDIA AI Enterprise software allows us to meet that expectation, enabling enterprises and developers to easily access everything they need to train and deploy custom, secure large language models.”

The NVIDIA AI Enterprise integration with Azure Machine Learning is available in a limited technical preview in the NVIDIA community registry. NVIDIA AI Enterprise is also available on Azure Marketplace.

Additionally, the NVIDIA Omniverse Cloud platform-as-a-service is now available on Microsoft Azure as a private offer for enterprises. Omniverse Cloud provides developers and enterprises with a full-stack cloud environment to design, develop, deploy and manage industrial metaverse applications at scale.

NVIDIA, Dell Team on Project Helix

In a separate announcement, NVIDIA and Dell Technologies announced a joint initiative (Project Helix) that the companies believe will make it easier for businesses to build and use generative AI models on premises.

According to the announcement, Project Helix will deliver a series of full-stack solutions with technical expertise and pre-built tools based on Dell and NVIDIA infrastructure and software. It includes a complete blueprint to help enterprises use their proprietary data and more easily deploy generative AI responsibly and accurately.   

“Project Helix gives enterprises purpose-built AI models to more quickly and securely gain value from the immense amounts of data underused today,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer, Dell Technologies. “With highly scalable and efficient infrastructure, enterprises can create a new wave of generative AI solutions that can reinvent their industries.”

“We are at a historic moment, when incredible advances in generative AI are intersecting with enterprise demand to do more with less,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA. “With Dell Technologies, we’ve designed extremely scalable, highly efficient infrastructure that enables enterprises to transform their business by securely using their own data to build and operate generative AI applications.”

Project Helix is designed to support the complete generative AI lifecycle – from infrastructure provisioning, modeling, training, fine-tuning, application development and deployment, to deploying inference and streamlining results.

Dell PowerEdge servers, such as the PowerEdge XE9680 and PowerEdge R760xa, are optimized to deliver performance for generative AI training and AI inferencing. The combination of Dell servers with NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA Networking form the infrastructure backbone for these workloads. Customers can pair this infrastructure with scalable unstructured data storage, including Dell PowerScale and Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage. 

With all Dell Validated Designs, customers can use the enterprise features of Dell server and storage software, with observability through Dell CloudIQ software. Project Helix also includes NVIDIA AI Enterprise software to provide tools for customers as they move through the AI lifecycle.

“Companies are eager to explore the opportunities that generative AI tools enable for their organizations, but many aren’t sure how to get started,” said Bob O’Donnell, president and chief analyst, TECHnalysis Research. “By putting together a complete hardware and software solution from trusted brands, Dell Technologies and NVIDIA are offering enterprises a head start to building and refining AI-powered models that can leverage their own company’s unique assets and create powerful, customized tools.”

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.