Category Archives: Nvidia

NVIDIA GTC roundup: Next-gen data centres and cloud provider partnerships

NVIDIA’s 2024 GTC event, taking place through March 21, saw the usual plethora of announcements one would expect from a major tech conference. One stood out, from founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote: the next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture, enabling organisations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models. “The future is… Read more »

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AliCloud launches 20 services under brand name Big Data Platform

dataAlibaba Cloud Computing (Alicloud) is to launch 20 new online services to the Chinese market under the brand name Big Data Platform.

The new application service range caters for activities in the data development chain, including processing, analysis, computing, machine learning and big data hosting. Around 1,000 developers are expected to be developing services with AliCloud in the next three years.

The plan is to use all the data-processing capacity and data-security skills that the Alibaba Group has accumulated in ten years of running the world’s biggest ecommerce platform, AliCloud president Simon Hu told reporters at the launch. “That data becomes a resource and a service that we can provide our clients,” said Hu.

Meanwhile, AliCloud is working with US chip specialist Nvidia to develop China’s first GPU-based, high-performance computing cloud platform. Along with offering clients GPU-accelerated computing services AliCloud aims to remove the data bottlenecks that handicap many chinese companies, according to Hu.

The Nvidia GPU-based services could also improve the computing capacity of many of Alibaba’s typical users in China, such as manufacturers and distributors, said Hu. “Right now, AliCloud mainly serves internet companies, but our next step will be to also provide cloud computing services to traditional industries such as manufacturing to remove the computing limitations that these companies may face,” said Hu.

The new launch puts AliCloud in direct contention with big data service supplier Data Mall, a start-up that recently launched an online mall for big data assets. The Data Mall cloud offering helps service providers and independent researchers to trade intelligence and market information. Consulting firm Guan Zheng Hang Seng says the Beijing Datatang owned Data Mall service now has 460,000 users supplying raw data to its platform.

A study by Forrester Research forecast that the enterprise cloud service market in China will be worth $3.8 billion by 2020, more than double its estimated size of $1.8 billion last year. According to Forrester analyst Charlie Dai AliCloud now has the Chinese market’s biggest range of public cloud services and alliances with service providers.

IBM, Nvidia, Mellanox launch OpenPower design centre to target big data apps

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM has set up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target big data and HPC

IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox are setting up another OpenPower design centre in Europe to target development of high performance computing (HPC) apps based on the open source Power architecture.

The move will see technical experts from IBM, Nvidia and Mellanox jointly develop applications on OpenPower architecture which take advantage of the companies’ respective technologies – specifically IBM Power CPUs, Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox InfiniBand networking solution.

The companies said the move will both advance development of HPC software and create new opportunities for software developers to acquire HPC-related skills and experience.

“Our launch of this new centre reinforces IBM’s commitment to open-source collaboration and is a next step in expanding the software and solution ecosystem around OpenPower,” said Dave Turek, IBM’s vice president of HPC Market Engagement.

“Teaming with Nvidia and Mellanox, the centre will allow us to leverage the strengths of each of our companies to extend innovation and bring higher value to our customers around the world,” Turek said.

The centre will be located in IBM’s client centre in Montpellier, France and complement the Jülich Supercomputing Center launched in November last year.

IBM has been working with a broad range of stakeholders spanning the technology, research and government sectors on Power-based supercomputers in order to satisfy its big Power architecture ambitions. The company hopes Power will command roughly a third of the scale-out market over the next few years.

Nvidia: ‘Cloud to generate $1bn for the firm in a few years’

Nvidia's chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn for the firm in just a few years

Nvidia’s chief exec believes cloud will generate over $1bn annually for the firm in just a few years

Chip maker and GPU specialist Nvidia Corp said it expects cloud computing to generate over $1bn in revenues for the firm in the next few years, according to a report from Reuters.

Speaking to reporters at Computex Nvidia’s chief executive officer Jen-Hsun Huang also said the company expects cloud revenues to grow between 60 and 70 per cent each year.

A number of cloud service providers have borrowed from the high performance computing world to add GPU acceleration to their services in a bid to cope with diminishing returns on CPU performance.

HPC and cloud revenue at Nvidia was $79m for the recently reported Q1 2016, up 57 per cent year-on-year, and the company has over the past year or so announced some large deals with companies like Baidu, Facebook, Flickr, Microsoft and Twitter, largely around its Tesla and GRID offerings.

Last year it also struck a deal with AWS to add GPU-accelerated instances to its growing roster of services.

Nvidia has said much of its growth in recent quarters has come from datacentre, cloud, gaming and automotive, and that its deals with virtualisation incumbents VMware and Citrix are helping to give it a strong boost in the enterprise. Speaking to journalists and analysts in February this year Huang said its deal with VMware alone means about 80 per cent of the world’s enterprises now support its GRID GPU virtualisation technology.