NVIDIA introduces real-time AI for enterprises

NVIDIA has announced two additions to its EGX Edge artificial intelligence (AI) platform — the EGX A100 for larger commercial off-the-shelf servers and the much smaller EGX Jetson Xavier NX for micro-edge servers — delivering high-performance, secure AI processing at the edge to serve different size, cost and performance needs.

The NVIDIA EGX Edge AI platform makes it possible to securely deploy, manage and update fleets of servers remotely. Servers powered by the EGX A100 converged accelerator can manage hundreds of cameras in airports, for example, while the EGX Jetson Xavier NX micro-edge server can manage a handful of cameras in convenience stores.

“The fusion of IoT* and AI has launched the ‘smart everything’ revolution,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

“Large industries can now offer intelligent connected products and services like the phone industry has with the smartphone. NVIDIA’s EGX Edge AI platform transforms a standard server into a mini cloud-native, secure, AI data centre. "With our AI application frameworks, companies can build AI services ranging from smart retail, robotic factories, to automated call centres.”

EGX A100 

The EGX A100 is the first edge AI product based on the NVIDIA Ampere architecture. It combines the groundbreaking computing performance of the NVIDIA Ampere architecture with the accelerated networking and critical security capabilities of the NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx SmartNIC to transform standard and purpose-built edge servers into secure, cloud-native AI supercomputers. As AI moves increasingly to the edge, organisations can include EGX A100 in their servers to carry out real time processing and protection of the massive amounts of streaming data from edge sensors.

The NVIDIA Ampere architecture — the company’s eighth-generation of innovative GPU architecture — delivers the largest-ever generational leap in performance for compute-intensive workloads, including AI inference and 5G applications running at the edge.

“Data, AI, and intelligent cloud-native applications are transforming the enterprise edge in every industry,” said Chris Wright, Senior VP and CTO, Red Hat.

“NVIDIA’s new EGX A100 converged accelerators combined with precompiled drivers for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and certified operators for Red Hat Openshift simplify deployment and management of the hardware and help our joint customers address some of the most demanding AI, edge and 5G workloads.”


“We’ve been collaborating with NVIDIA to build Mavenir’s high-performance virtualised 5G radio access network and accelerated 5G packet core network,” said Pardeep Kohli, President and CEO, at Mavenir, which offers cloud-native software to the communications service provider market. “This will enable us to deliver a wide range of new GPU-accelerated 5G services from AI/ML to AR/VR applications*.”

EGX Jetson Xavier NX 

The EGX Jetson Xavier NX is the world’s smallest, most powerful AI supercomputer for microservers and edge AIoT* boxes, with more than 20 solutions now available from ecosystem partners. It packs the power of an NVIDIA Xavier system-on-chip (SoC) into a credit-card sized module. The EGX Jetson Xavier NX, running the EGX cloud-native software stack, can quickly process streaming data from multiple high-resolution sensors.

“NVIDIA Jetson and NVIDIA EGX are helping us transform retail, making the self-checkout experience quicker and more secure,” said Matt Scott, cofounder and CEO, Malong Technologies, an AI company that provides computer vision technology for enterprises.

“Through the power of AI, via our RetailAI suite of offerings, it is now possible to accurately recognise hundreds of thousands of products in real time to create more seamless and protected shopping experiences, easily deployable at large scale. We’re continuing to explore NVIDIA’s powerful lineup to discover new ways to increase customer satisfaction and decrease retail shrink, by bringing more intelligence to the edge.”

The EGX Edge AI platform’s cloud-native architecture allows it to run containerised software to support a range of GPU-accelerated workloads. NVIDIA application frameworks include Clara for healthcare, Aerial for telcos, Jarvis for conversational AI, Isaac for robotics, Metropolis for smart cities, retail, transportation and more. They can be used together or individually for a variety of edge use cases.

With support for cloud-native technologies now available across the entire NVIDIA EGX lineup, manufacturers of intelligent machines and developers of AI applications can build and deploy high-quality, software-defined features on embedded and edge devices targeting robotics, smart cities, healthcare, industrial IoT and more.

Existing edge servers enabled with NVIDIA EGX software are available from global enterprise computing providers Atos, Dell Technologies, Fujitsu, GIGABYTE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Inspur, Lenovo, Quanta/QCT, and Supermicro. They are also available from major server and IoT system makers such as Advantech and ADLINK.

These servers along with optimised application frameworks can be used by software vendors such as Whiteboard Coordinator, Deep Vision AI, IronYun, Malong and SAFR by RealNetworks to build and deploy healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and smart cities solutions.

Details:

The EGX A100 will be available at the end of the year. Ready-to-deploy micro-edge servers based on the EGX Jetson Xavier NX are available now for companies looking to create high-volume production edge systems.

*IoT is the acronym for the Internet of Things. AIoT is the AI of Things, or where AI converges with IoT. ML stands for machine learning, while AR/VR refer to augmented reality and virtual reality.