NVIDIA announced the global expansion of its NVIDIA LaunchPad program, which is growing from its initial availability in North America to operations in nine locations around the world.
Available directly from NVIDIA, LaunchPad provides immediate access to optimized software running on accelerated infrastructure to help customers prototype and test data science and AI workloads with a set of curated labs.
Qualified enterprises can experience the NVIDIA Base Command cloud service for AI development, the NVIDIA Fleet Command cloud service for AI deployment and the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite for end-to-end AI workflows in core data centers — all at no charge. LaunchPad features NVIDIA-Certified Systems and NVIDIA DGX systems, running the entire NVIDIA AI software stack.
“Industries are adopting AI to achieve more accurate diagnoses in healthcare, improved safety in manufacturing, greater efficiency in agriculture, and many more critical use cases,” said Manuvir Das, head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA LaunchPad program helps enterprises worldwide quickly determine their AI requirements on the same stack they can purchase and deploy, giving them a running start with support from NVIDIA before a single server even ships.”
NKI Tests AI for Cancer Research Breakthroughs
Among the first to test AI workloads on LaunchPad is the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), an internationally acclaimed cancer center for treatment and research.
“AI can improve the precision of 3D cancer scans, which helps healthcare professionals target the exact site of a tumor for radiotherapy on each day the patient receives treatment,” said Jonas Teuwen, group leader, AI for Oncology at NKI. “Our NVIDIA LaunchPad experience showed that advanced AI workloads can run virtualized on mainstream, accelerated servers with NVIDIA AI Enterprise and VMware vSphere, which means that AI-powered breakthroughs in cancer treatment can be more accessible to a broader range of healthcare providers.”
Worldwide AI Access with LaunchPad at Equinix
Digital infrastructure leader Equinix is the first NVIDIA LaunchPad program partner. NVIDIA-Certified Systems are now deployed at Equinix International Business Exchange data centers globally. The LaunchPad program is supported by Equinix services including its data center, connectivity and bare-metal offerings.
“AI is becoming ubiquitous, and as enterprises race to integrate it into their products and services, NVIDIA’s LaunchPad program at Equinix helps companies get going faster than ever before,” said Steve Steinhilber, vice president of Business Development at Equinix. “After a LaunchPad experience, businesses can run their NVIDIA-accelerated AI workloads at Equinix locations globally to take advantage of close proximity to our extensive ecosystem of cloud, network and technology partners.”
Immediate Access to Full Portfolio of NVIDIA AI Software and Infrastructure
LaunchPad allows for quick testing and prototyping of AI workflows with cloud-based interfaces into private compute, storage and network infrastructure. It includes development tools like TensorFlow and PyTorch, as well as application frameworks focused on vision AI, medical imaging, cybersecurity and more.
NVIDIA Base Command coordinates AI development, running workloads across powerful accelerated computing infrastructure wherever data resides. NVIDIA Fleet Command securely deploys, manages and scales AI on NVIDIA-Certified servers in the data center or at the network edge, enabling enterprises to control their AI deployments from a single screen.
LaunchPad also features the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite running on NVIDIA-Certified Systems to power enterprise AI workloads in VMware vSphere environments.
“The NVIDIA LaunchPad program provides an ideal way for customers to experience how simple it is to add enterprise AI workloads to VMware vSphere-based clouds with NVIDIA AI Enterprise,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president and GM, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group at VMware. “When customers are ready to take the next step in AI, they can quickly leverage the preconfigured and optimized NVIDIA LaunchPad for prototyping their workloads and significantly speed up their adoption of the AI-Ready solution from VMware and NVIDIA.”
Curated labs in LaunchPad help enterprises grow their skills and evaluate the requirements needed for a number of common AI applications. The NVIDIA-developed labs include training a model using TensorFlow, performing sentiment analysis with NVIDIA RAPIDS, deploying an AI support chatbot using Fleet Command and more.
Qualified enterprises can evaluate AI workloads on NVIDIA LaunchPad at no charge. Apply now for NVIDIA LaunchPad access.
Following their LaunchPad experience, customers can choose how to accelerate their AI initiatives:
- NVIDIA AI Enterprise: Customers can purchase licenses to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise software on mainstream, NVIDIA-Certified Systems available from leading server manufacturers, including ASUS, Atos, Dell Technologies, GIGABYTE, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Inspur Electronic Information, Lenovo and Supermicro, at data centers and edge locations, or deploy their AI infrastructure at Equinix. NVIDIA AI Enterprise solutions are also available from NVIDIA channel partners worldwide, including Atea, Axians, Carahsoft Technology Corp., Computacenter, Insight Enterprises, Presidio, Sirius, SoftServe, SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH, TD SYNNEX, Trace3 and World Wide Technology.
- NVIDIA Base Command: Base Command is available as a managed service that also includes NVIDIA DGX systems and NetApp Keystone Flex Subscription.
- NVIDIA Fleet Command: Customers can purchase licenses for Fleet Command to run on NVIDIA-Certified Systems or hybrid clouds.
Register for free to learn more about NVIDIA LaunchPad during NVIDIA GTC, taking place online through Nov. 11. Watch NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote address below.