VMware and Nvidia partner to simplify virtualised GPUs

26 Aug 2019

The Nvidia logo in Silicon Valley. Image: SundryPhotography/Depositphotos

Nvidia announced its new enterprise software product, vComputeServer, which has been developed and optimised for use with VMware’s vSphere.

Last week, VMware announced its intention to acquire Carbon Black and Pivotal, in a massive deal that will expand the company’s SaaS offerings, while enhancing its ability to enable digital transformation for customers.

Before the dust had even settled on that news, the company announced today (26 August), that it is set to launch a hybrid cloud on AWS (Amazon Web Services) in partnership with Nvidia, which will improve GPU (graphics processing unit) virtualisation.

The two companies say that this is the first hybrid cloud service that lets enterprises accelerate AI, machine learning or deep learning workloads with GPUs.

At the VMWorld conference in San Francisco, Nvidia’s VP of product management, John Fanelli, told reporters: “In a modern data centre, organisations are going to be using GPUs to power AI, deep learning and analytics.

“Due to the scale of those types of workloads, they’re going to be doing some processing on premise in data centres, some processing in clouds and continually iterating between them.”

‘Fostering innovation’

Nvidia’s new enterprise software product, vComputeServer, has been developed and optimised for VMware’s vSphere. It’s also compatible with vCenter and vMotion.

The company said that this will make the completion of deep learning training up to 50 times faster than with a CPU alone.

This product is aimed at people who may be using Nvidia’s Rapids software, Fanelli explained, which is a suite of data processing and machine learning libraries used for GPU-acceleration in data science workflows.

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “From operational intelligence to artificial intelligence, businesses rely on GPU-accelerated computing to make fast, accurate predictions that directly impact their bottom line.

“Together with VMware, we’re designing the most advanced and highest performing GPU-accelerated hybrid cloud infrastructure to foster innovation across the enterprise.”

VMware, Cisco, Dell and Red Hat will use vComputeServer to streamline deployment and management of GPU servers.

The Nvidia logo in Silicon Valley. Image: SundryPhotography/Depositphotos

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com