Nvidia Exec: We Need Partners To Push GPU-Based AI Solutions

Nvidia sales executive Kevin Connors says channel partners play an important role in the chipmaker's strategy for selling and supporting GPU-accelerated solutions for artificial intelligence -- a market that is still in its early stages and can provide the channel major growth opportunities as a result. "People are wanting higher performance computing at supercomputing levels, so that they can solve the world's problems, whether it's discovery of the next genome or better analysis and other such workloads," Connors, Nvidia's vice president of sales, global partners, said in an interview with CRN. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company's GPUs have become increasingly important in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence workloads, thanks to the parallel computing capabilities offered by their large number of cores and the substantial software ecosystem Nvidia has built around its CUDA platform, also known as Compute Unified Device Architecture, which debuted in 2007. "As a company, we've always been focused on solving tough problems, problems that no one else could solve, and we invested in that. And so when we came out with CUDA -- which allowed application developers to port their high-performance computing apps, their scientific apps, engineering apps to our GPU platform -- that really began the process of developing a very rich ecosystem for high-performance computing," said Connors, who has been with Nvidia since 2006.