Nvidia and VMware team up for machine learning hybrid cloud on AWS

New enterprise-grade hybrid cloud to accelerate application modernisation

Nvidia and VMware today announced the launch of an accelerated GPU service on VMware Cloud on AWS, forming an advanced hybrid cloud infrastructure for machine learning workloads.

The new service will allow organisations to migrate VMware vSphere-based applications and containers to VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware’s cloud service that runs on bare metal infrastructure in AWS data centres, where they can take advantage of high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics and video processing applications, backed up by Nvidia accelerators.

Specifically, VMware Cloud on AWS customers will be able to rent Amazon EC2 bare metal instances, an AWS service that provides resizable compute capacity, that are accelerated by Nvidia T4 100 GPUs.

The lynchpin of the hybrid platform is Nvidia’s vComputeServer, virtual vGPU technology that enables GPU-accelerated deployment of workloads in virtual environments. The technology is not technically new but Nvidia has expanded support to VMware virtual environments including vSphere, vCenter and VMware cloud.

It is typical for GPU-accelerated workloads such as AI training to run on bare metal, which are usually managed independently from a company’s other servers.

vComputeServer enables IT admins to streamline management of GPU-accelerated virtualised servers while retaining existing workflows and lowering overall operational costs, Nvidia said in a statement.

“Compared to CPU-only servers, vComputeServer with four Nvidia V100 GPUs accelerates deep learning 50x faster, delivering performance near bare metal,” the company added in a press release announcing the launch.

vComputeServer also enables GPU sharing, so multiple virtual machines can be powered by a single GPU, and GPU aggregation, that allows multiple GPUs to power a virtual machine, maximising utilisation and further reducing operational costs.

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

“Together with VMware, we’re designing the most advanced GPU infrastructure to foster innovation across the enterprise, from virtualisation, to hybrid cloud, to VMware’s new Bitfusion data center disaggregation.”