Promising to bring AI to every enterprise, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang kicked off VMworld 2020 Tuesday with a conversation detailing the companies’ broad new partnership.
VMware and NVIDIA announced that, together, they will deliver an end-to-end enterprise platform for AI as well as a new architecture for data center, cloud and edge that uses NVIDIA DPUs to support existing and next-generation applications.
“We’re going to bring the power of AI to every enterprise. We’re going to bring the NVIDIA AI computing platform and our AI application frameworks onto VMware,” Huang said.
View today’s VMworld 2020 CEO discussion featuring Pat Gelsinger and Jensen Huang, and join us at GTC 2020 on October 5 to learn more.
Through this collaboration, the rich set of AI software available on the NVIDIA NGC hub will be integrated into VMware vSphere, VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware Tanzu.
“For every virtual infrastructure admin, we have millions of people that know how to run the vSphere stack,” Gelsinger said. “They’re running it every day, all day long, it’s now the same tools, the same processes, the same networks, the same security, is now fully being made available on the GPU infrastructure.”
This will help accelerate AI adoption, enabling enterprises to extend existing infrastructure for AI, manage all applications with a single set of operations, and deploy AI-ready infrastructure where the data resides, across the data center, cloud and edge.
Additionally, as part of VMware’s Project Monterey, also announced Tuesday, the companies will partner to deliver an architecture for the hybrid cloud based on SmartNIC technology, including NVIDIA’s programmable BlueField-2 DPU.
“The characteristics, the pillars of Project Monterey of offloading the operating system, the data center operating system, onto the SmartNIC, isolating the applications from the control plane and the data plane, and accelerating the data processing and the security processing to line speed is going to make the data center so much more powerful, so much more performant,” Huang said.
Among the organizations integrating their VMware and NVIDIA ecosystems is the UCSF Center for Intelligent Imaging.
“I can’t imagine a more impactful use of AI than healthcare,” Huang said. “The intersection of people, disease and treatments is one of the greatest challenges of humanity, and one where AI will be needed to move the needle.”
A leader in the development of AI and analysis tools in medical imaging, the center uses the NVIDIA Clara healthcare application framework for AI-powered imaging and VMware Cloud Foundation to support a broad range of mission-critical workloads.
“This way of doing computing is going to be the way that the future data centers are built. It’s going to allow us to essentially turn every enterprise into an AI,” Huang said. “Every company will become AI-driven.”
“Our audience is so excited to see how we’re coming together, to see how everything they’ve done for the past two decades with VMware now it’s going to be even further expanded,” Gelsinger said.