Nvidia this week announced AI Enterprise 2.1, the latest version of its enterprise software cloud environment, a move that comes about seven months after the company rolled out Version 1.1.’
That earlier version aimed to broaden availability and appeal of the platform by extending it to support containerized AI via VMware’s Vsphere on Tanzu. Now, Version 2.1 is targeted at reaching even more AI workloads where they live on hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
AI Enterprise 2.1 accomplishes this through support for Red Hat OpenShift running in the public cloud and the new Microsoft Azure NVads A10 v5 series. These are the first Nvidia virtual GPU instances offered from the public cloud, which enables affordable GPU sharing, Nvidia stated in a blog post.
Nvidia also announced Launchpad Labs, a new feature of its Launchpad offering that allows enterprises to speed up the development and deployment of modern, data-driven applications, and quickly test and prototype the entire AI workflow on the same complete stack available for deployment.
In addition, AI Enterprise 2.1 integrates the latest version of Nvidia’s TAO Toolkit low-code framework for creating custom, production-ready models to power speech and vision AI applications. This includes new key features including REST APIs integration, pre-trained weights import, TensorBoard integration, and new pre-trained models.
The AI Enterprise 2.1 software suite also includes Nvidia’s RAPIDS 22.04 release, which provides more support for data workflows through the addition of new models, techniques, and data processing capabilities across all the Nvidia data science libraries.