NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA EGX, an accelerated computing platform that enables companies to perform low-latency artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge. It can be used “to perceive, understand and act in real time on continuous streaming data between 5G base stations, warehouses, retail stores, factories and beyond.”
The company said in a press release that the new NVIDIA edge computing platform was created to meet the growing demand to perform instantaneous, high-throughput AI at the edge — where data is created – with “guaranteed response times, while reducing the amount of data that must be sent to the Cloud.”
Edge servers like those in the NVIDIA EGX platform will be distributed throughout the world to process data in real time from these sensors.
“Enterprises demand more powerful computing at the edge to process their oceans of raw data — streaming in from countless interactions with customers and facilities — to make rapid, AI-enhanced decisions that can drive their business,” said Bob Pette, Vice-president and General Manager of Enterprise and Edge Computing at NVIDIA. “A scalable platform like NVIDIA EGX allows them to easily deploy systems to meet their needs on premises, in the cloud or both.”
Scalability
EGX starts with the tiny NVIDIA Jetson Nano, which in a few watts can provide one-half trillion operations per second (TOPS) of processing for tasks such as image recognition. It spans all the way to a full rack of NVIDIA T4 servers, delivering more than 10,000 TOPS for real-time speech recognition and other real-time AI tasks.
Enterprise-Grade
NVIDIA has partnered with Red Hat to integrate and optimize NVIDIA Edge Stack with OpenShift, the leading enterprise-grade Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
“Red Hat is committed to providing a consistent experience for any workload, footprint and location, from the hybrid cloud to the edge,” said Chris Wright, Chief Technology Officer at Red Hat. “By combining Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA EGX-enabled platforms, customers can better optimize their distributed operations with a consistent, high-performance, container-centric environment.”
An “On-Prem AI Cloud-in-a-Box”
EGX combines the full range of NVIDIA AI computing technologies with Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA Edge Stack together with Mellanox and Cisco security, networking and storage technologies. This enables companies in the largest industries — telecom, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and transportation — to quickly stand up state-of-the-art, secure, enterprise-grade AI infrastructures, the release said.
Enables Hybrid-Cloud and Multi-Cloud IoT
NVIDIA AI computing is offered by major Clouds and is architecturally compatible with NVIDIA EGX. AI applications developed in the cloud can run on NVIDIA EGX and vice versa. NVIDIA Edge Stack connects to major cloud IoT services, and customers can remotely manage their service from AWS IoT Greengrass and Microsoft Azure IoT Edge.
Image Credit: NVIDIA