Nvidia is talking up AI at Computex 2021, which is returning to Taiwan as a hybrid in-person and virtual event, that will be held tomorrow. Nvidia and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) last week flipped the “on” switch for Perlmutter, billed as the world’s fastest supercomputer for AI workloads.

The new Base Command platform gives developers access to the cloud-hosted computing power of Nvidia DGX SuperPOD AI supercomputers and NetApp data management tools.

Nvidia touted Base Command as a way for enterprise developers to “quickly move their AI projects from prototypes to production” with software designed “for large-scale, multi-user and multi-team AI development workflows hosted either on-premises or in the cloud,” the company said. The software development platform enables numerous researchers and data scientists to “simultaneously work on accelerated computing resources, helping enterprises maximize the productivity of both their expert developers and their valuable AI infrastructure,” the company said.

Base Command offers a single pane of glass interface to view AI software development on integrated monitoring and reporting dashboards, with command-line APIs available.

Nvidia also announced the availability of new AI-optimized servers from major computer manufacturers as part of its Nvidia-certified systems program. The new systems are certified to run Nvidia AI Enterprise software and are either available now or coming later this year from OEMs. Participating companies include Advantech, Altos, ASRock Rack, Asus, Dell Technologies, Gigabyte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lenovo, Nettrix, QCT, and Supermicro.

New x86 servers based on Nvidia Ampere architecture GPUs are available now, the company said. Nvidia-certified systems using Bluefield-2 DPUs will come out later this year and non-x86 machines powered by Arm CPUs will arrive in 2022. Manuvir Das, Nvidia head of enterprise computing, said:

“Enterprises across every industry need to support their innovative work in AI on traditional data centre infrastructure. The open, growing ecosystem of Nvidia-certified systems provides unprecedented customer choice in servers validated by Nvidia to power world-class AI.”

Das said the new servers will become “some of the highest-volume x86 servers used in mainstream data centres, bringing the power of AI to a wide range of industries, including health care, manufacturing, retail, and financial services.”

The certified systems are expected to run software such as the Nvidia AI Enterprise suite of AI and data analytics software on VMware vSphere, Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise for design collaboration and advanced simulation, and Red Hat OpenShift for AI development, with additional support for Cloudera data engineering and machine learning modelling tools.

NVIDIA Jarvis Open Beta 

NVIDIA announced major capabilities to the fully accelerated conversational AI framework. It includes highly accurate automated speech recognition, real-time machine translation for multiple languages and text-to-speech capabilities to create expressive conversational AI agents.

Highlights include:

• Speech recognition model trained on thousands of audio hours with greater than 90% accuracy
• Real-time machine translation for five languages that run under 100ms per sentence
• Expressive TTS that delivers 30x higher throughput with FastPitch+HiFiGAN vs Tacotron2+WaveGlow

Triton Inference Server 2.7 

NVIDIA announced Triton Inference Server 2.9. Triton is an open source inference serving software that maximizes performance and simplifies production deployment at scale. Release updates include:

• Model Navigator (alpha), a new tool in Triton which automatically converts TensorFlow and PyTorch models to a TensorRT plan, validates accuracy, and sets up the deployment environment
• Model Analyzer will now automatically determine optimal batch size and model instances to maximize performance, based on latency or throughput requirements
• Support for OpenVINO backend (beta) for high performance inferencing on CPU, Windows Triton build (alpha), and integration with MLOps platforms: Seldon and Allegro

TensorRT 7.2 is Now Available

TensorRT 8.0 is the latest version of the high-performance deep learning inference SDK. This version includes:

• Quantization Aware Training for FP32 accuracy with INT8 precision 
• Sparsity support on Ampere GPUs delivers up to 50% higher throughput
• Up to 2x faster inference for transformer based networks like BERT with new compiler optimizations
• TensorRT 8.0 will be freely available to members of NVIDIA Developer Program in Q2, 2021.

NVIDIA NeMo 1.0 RC

NVIDIA NeMo is an open-source toolkit for developing state-of-the-art conversational AI models, including:

• ASR collection: Added new state-of-the-art model architectures – CitriNet and Conformer-CTC. Also used the Mozilla Common Voice dataset and AIshell-2 corpus to add speech recognition support for multiple languages including – Mandarin, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Russian, Polish, and Catalan.
• NLP collection: Added ten neural machine translation language models supporting bidirectional translation between English and Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, German and French
• TTS collection: Added support for HiFiGan, MelGan, GlowTTS, UniGlow, and SqueezeWave model architectures and pre-trained models.

NGC Updates (Includes Framework Updates)

• The NGC catalog is a hub of GPU-optimized containers, pre-trained models, SDKs and Helm charts designed to accelerate end-to-end AI workflows. Updates include:
• Deep Learning Frameworks
• Brand new UI – enables users to navigate, find and download content faster than before with features such as improved search and filtering, tagged content, and direct links to all documentation on the home page.
• New and Updated Partner Software