Supermicro Nvidia NGC-Ready Platforms as AI & Deep Learning Solutions
Accelerate your AI Software Development with NGC-Ready Solutions
Unless you have been living inside your server cabinet you have likely heard, used, and tinkered with artificial intelligence (AI). You can develop AI solutions on a laptop in your lunch breaks utilizing an integrated GPU. However, it will take you forever to create an AI solution for anything other than classifying if an image is a ‘dog’ or a ‘cat’.
This is because of the iterative process needed for learning to occur before a solution can be run in anger. AI weighted matrices need each node weighting to be adjusted to reduce overall error to a predefined error tolerance.
When multiple data filters, called layers are added for complex solutions the process is called deep learning. This is due to the granular learning that needs to occur to provide a solution. The number of nodes drastically increases with each layer as does the time it takes to iterate control data through the system. The goal is to optimize the weighting values at each node during this iterative process.
NVIDIA NGC: What You Need to Know
The NVIDIA NGC Catalog is a set of GPU optimized software specifically utilized for the creation of AI and visualization applications. NGC-Ready technology means that hardware has passed rigorous testing to ensure it can deliver NGC containers.
Containers essentially take software applications, dependencies, and libraries along with key environmental prerequisites and bundle them with your solution. In a sense, they are very similar to virtual machines without virtual hardware configurations.
Solutions created in Tensorflow for example will also utilize Docker or NVIDIA Docker to enable solutions to be transferred between teams. This is exceptionally useful during software development and finally to integrate with 3rdparty hardware.
Benefits of NGC-Ready Platforms
When developing software, it is key to have environments that support the framework. Libraries, dependencies, and anything else needed to create and run the solution must be present.
If your hardware is not NGC-ready it means that you'll have trouble adding and running these items. NGC-Ready means you don't need to worry about this and you can work to a project's scope without having to find poorly fitting workarounds.
Your system will come pre-installed with an operating system, container, and CUDA environment needed to run NVIDIA NGC software. This means you will have access to all GPU-optimized software from NVIDIA for development and deep learning activities.
Both of which will benefit from the optimized software to give you the fastest and best performance completing each task. You don’t have to tinker in the background to get things working, run benchmarking or risk destroying your system hardware.
Solution Architecture
You will find NGC-Ready platforms in data centers or remote cloud solutions. You will also see them in edge micro-datacentres and in distributed networking applications.
Supermicro SuperServers are not only NVIDIA certified NGC-Ready but also designed to run the latest NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Platforms utilize NVMe for the fastest possible data storage.
This is key to success when going through larger datasets during the deep learning process. SuperServers can optionally also come enabled ready for instant AI development with Operating System, CUDA, CUDA-X and all NVIDIA drives, containers all preloaded. This means you can just power on the server and get going within minutes.
Containers used for software development ensure that you can take your AI solution off the system and run it anywhere. Excellent for teamwork and delivering solutions to external clients.
With containers, you can also take advantage of edge devices that run AI hardware with compatible AI SDKs. This means that you can simply add the container to a product through a USB interface or memory card. For clients that reuse hardware for multidisciplinary AI-based projects containers are the perfect development tool.
Supermicro provides support for solutions including server setup and a Kubernetes consulting service. SuperServers are designed to be high-density, modular, scalable, and fully integrable within an end-to-end workflow.
The Verdict
Supermicro SuperServers are NGC-Ready and a great way to establish an end-to-end AI workflow within your organization. Solutions are fully scalable and can grow with the success of the enterprise provide all the tools you need and are certified to work as intended.
The great thing about Supermicro is their support and their ability to provide their expertise to get you up and running quickly.