Diamanti today announced the availability of the first enterprise platform with GPU support for running containerized workloads under Kubernetes, ideal for the demanding requirements of emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. In conjunction with its recent announcement of Diamanti Spektra, customers can now provide to their end users GPU capacity in cloud clusters for scaling AI/ML workloads on premises out to public clouds to accelerate model development and training.

"AI is quickly proving to be the most disruptive set of new technologies in decades thanks to breathtaking advances in computing power, volume, velocity and variety of data," said Tom Barton, CEO of Diamanti. "Our platform offers unmatched extensibility and flexibility for containerized workloads and now our customers can add GPU support for a heterogeneous environment under the same Kubernetes umbrella to help with even the most demanding AI/ML requirements."

Market analyst firm Gartner Inc. predicts ("Forecast: The Business Value of Artificial Intelligence, Worldwide, 2017-2025") that artificial intelligence technology will drive industry business value of more than $1.9 trillion by the end of this year, up 62 percent from the year before.

The new Diamanti platform for AI/ML workloads fully supports Nvidia's NVLink cross connect GPU card technology for higher performing workloads, as well as Kubeflow, a machine learning framework for Kubernetes that provides highly-available Jupyter notebooks and ML pipelines.

"Cloud-native methodology and software are crossing over with AI and machine learning, with Kubernetes an increasingly attractive option for data scientists to orchestrate the distributed architecture required to run multiple machine learning libraries and frameworks in production at scale," said Matt Aslett, Research Vice President, 451 Research. "One key use case across several verticals involves infrastructure that can be quickly spun up or down to support massive simulations." 

Early access Diamanti customers are already benefiting from the new platform support for GPUs in industries as varied as financial services, energy and travel, among others.

"Diamanti helps our customers accelerate their strategic AI and HPC computing initiatives with a powerful and flexible platform leveraging the unique capabilities of Kubernetes for containerized workloads," said Erik Melander, CEO of Astellent, a San Francisco-based systems integration company specializing in containers and AI. "GPU support increases the value of Kubernetes by improving the performance of both AI and high-performance computing workloads."

For AI/ML applications requiring GPUs, the new Diamanti Spektra solution can also now manage the full lifecycle of containerized workloads across on-premises and public clouds, moving applications and data between Kubernetes clusters as necessary. Diamanti Spektra combines the power of Diamanti's hardware-accelerated x86 platform along with cloud-based infrastructure to provide Kubernetes-as-a-Service. Diamanti Spektra is in technology preview.  If interested in participating, please visit https://diamanti.com/product/beta/ to register.