At the 2018 Computing Conference Shenzhen Summit on March 28, Alibaba Cloud announced the cooperation with NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC). Now, developers can download the NVIDIA GPU Cloud image from the Alibaba Cloud Marketplace and run NGC containers to use the NVIDIA GPU computing platform on Alibaba Cloud. NGC containers can be used to access NVIDIA optimized deep learning software, HPC applications, NVIDIA HPC visualization tools, and applications of partners. Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud provider to integrate NGC GPU-accelerated containers in China.
GPU for Artificial Intelligence Research
Currently, more than one million engineers around the world are engaged in artificial intelligence (AI), and they are in great need of latest deep learning frameworks and convenient development environments. In the past, software integration jobs such as driver installation and library compiling are time consuming and labor intensive. Now, the GPU computing platform on Alibaba Cloud can work with NGC to significantly reduce the development environment provisioning time.
Benefits of NVIDIA GPU Cloud
NGC can help developers access deep learning containers for free. Deep learning frameworks, including Caffe, Caffe2, CNTK, MXNet, TensorFlow, Theano, and Torch, are pre-integrated, tested, and optimized for NVIDIA GPU, removing the need for manual integration.
The NGC containers on Alibaba Cloud enable developers to quickly access deep learning frameworks, saving a lot of time in product development and service deployment. Users can establish their own AI applications by using Alibaba Cloud and NGC containers.
Research Initiatives by Alibaba Cloud
Since 2015, Alibaba Cloud has launched a series of heterogeneous acceleration platforms for the Elastic GPU cloud computing service, to offer global acceleration capabilities for the AI industry in various scenarios. In November 2017, Alibaba Cloud launched GN6, the first instance with NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 GPUs in China, which improves the deep learning performance multiple folds. Now, several million developers are gaining their deep learning and AI development abilities by leveraging Alibaba Cloud.
As AI has been industrialized, turning the latest AI technology into productivity becomes one of core demands of enterprises. To enable complex and cutting-edge AI technologies to be more widely used, Alibaba Cloud has launched various solutions such as the machine learning algorithm platform PAI and ET Brain while improving the cloud infrastructure. These solutions help enterprises innovate more easily, and enable computing and AI technologies to better serve people.
