Shaping the future of AI with NVIDIA: Storage is a big part of the equation

AI has been a hot topic of conversation for a while, but anyone with their finger on the pulse would agree, 2017 has been the year of developing AI theory and understanding the potential— including what it actually means and can do for industry and humanity.

Now more than ever, debate is taking place not just about its potential, but about its real life applications and implementation. To capitalise on that, across APJ we’re acutely listening to the world’s experts discuss the future of AI and how the technology will, and is already, revolutionising the enterprise.  It’s very interesting listening to the case studies and deciphering the scale or differentiation required to make AI projects affordable or providing the returns we need to justify them.

We were fortunate enough to recently attended the NVIDIA AI Conference in Singapore and were blown away by the innovation  and creativity on display. The two-day event in late October saw more than 1,500 attendees come together to discover the new computing model of GPU deep learning, and its AI applications for smart cities, industry, health, research, and development. Even agriculture.  

Michael Cornwell, CTO, APJ at Pure Storage, was one of the speakers. He talked the audience through how to build a modern data hub for the unknown. In the cloud era, fast, simple, and scalable data hubs are crucial for enterprises looking to expand their computing power and venture into AI. It was great to hear Michael explain why flash storage is the strategic asset for enterprises to handle the demands of AI and its huge volume of unstructured data sets. Particularly given Pure Storage’s FlashBlade is the first cloud-era, all-flash data platform purpose built for modern analytics and the massively parallel needs of AI.

October also saw us attend NVIDIA GTC Taipei, a two-day event with a variety of presentations and computing workshops with training in AI, CR, accelerated analysis, and unmanned vehicles. Here we showcased FlashBlade to more than 1,400 attendees. There are a lot of options entering our markets whether it’s new software tools and products coming of the valley or entire AI environments ready in the public cloud providers for experimentation and emerging AI projects.  All good options and definitely lowering the risk and cost of experimenting with an AI project.

Thanks to the NVIDIA team for hosting a great series of events that fostered discussions about the future of AI, and provided the technical training we’ll need to get us there. It’s an exciting space that is opening a totally new world of options.

*Pure Storage was a diamond sponsor at NVIDIA AI and NVIDIA GTC”