In July, VMware acquired Bitfusion, a company whose technology virtualizes compute accelerators with the goal of enabling modern workloads like artificial intelligence and data analytics to take full advantage of systems with GPUs or with FPGAs. Specifically, Bitfusion's software allows for virtual machines to offload compute duties to GPUs, FPGAs, or even other kinds of ASICs. The deal didn't get a ton of attention at the time, but for VMware, it was an important step in realizing its cloud ambitions. "Hardware acceleration for applications delivers efficiency and flexibility into the AI space, including subsets such as machine learning," Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's Cloud Platform business unit, wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition. "Unfortunately, hardware accelerators today are deployed with bare-metal practices, which force poor utilization, poor efficiencies, and limit organizations from sharing, abstracting and automating the infrastructure. This provides a perfect opportunity to virtualize them – providing increased sharing of resources and lowering costs."

NVIDIA's virtual GPU (vGPU) technology, which has already transformed virtual client computing, now supports server virtualization for AI, deep learning and data science. Previously limited to CPU-only, AI workloads can now be easily deployed on virtualized environments like VMware vSphere with new vComputeServer software and NVIDIA NGC. Through our partnership with VMware, this architecture will help organizations to seamlessly migrate AI workloads on GPUs between customer data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS. IT administrators can use hypervisor virtualization tools like VMware vSphere, including vCenter and vMotion, to manage all their data center applications, including AI applications running on NVIDIA GPUs. These GPU servers are often isolated, with the need to be managed separately.

Nvidia and VMware on Monday announced a new software product that lets customers virtualize GPUs, either on premise or as part of VMware Cloud on AWS. The companies say it's the first hybrid cloud offering that lets enterprises use GPUs to accelerate AI, machine learning or deep learning workloads. "In a modern data center, organizations are going to be using GPUs to power AI, deep learning, analytics," John Fanelli, VP of product management for Nvidia, told reporters. "And due to the scale of those types of workloads, they're going to be doing some processing on premise in data centers, some processing in clouds and continually iterating between them." The new offering starts with the enterprise data center product -- Nvidia's new Virtual Compute Server (vComputeServer) software.

Nvidia announced its new enterprise software product, vComputeServer, which has been developed and optimised for use with VMware's vSphere. Last week, VMware announced its intention to acquire Carbon Black and Pivotal, in a massive deal that will expand the company's SaaS offerings, while enhancing its ability to enable digital transformation for customers. Before the dust had even settled on that news, the company announced today (26 August), that it is set to launch a hybrid cloud on AWS (Amazon Web Services) in partnership with Nvidia, which will improve GPU (graphics processing unit) virtualisation. The two companies say that this is the first hybrid cloud service that lets enterprises accelerate AI, machine learning or deep learning workloads with GPUs. At the VMWorld conference in San Francisco, Nvidia's VP of product management, John Fanelli, told reporters: "In a modern data centre, organisations are going to be using GPUs to power AI, deep learning and analytics. "Due to the scale of those types of workloads, they're going to be doing some processing on premise in data centres, some processing in clouds and continually iterating between them." The company said that this will make the completion of deep learning training up to 50 times faster than with a CPU alone. This product is aimed at people who may be using Nvidia's Rapids software, Fanelli explained, which is a suite of data processing and machine learning libraries used for GPU-acceleration in data science workflows. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: "From operational intelligence to artificial intelligence, businesses rely on GPU-accelerated computing to make fast, accurate predictions that directly impact their bottom line.

Nvidia and VMware today announced the launch of an accelerated GPU service on VMware Cloud on AWS, forming an advanced hybrid cloud infrastructure for machine learning workloads. The new service will allow organisations to migrate VMware vSphere-based applications and containers to VMware Cloud on AWS, VMware's cloud service that runs on bare metal infrastructure in AWS data centres, where they can take advantage of high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics and video processing applications, backed up by Nvidia accelerators. Specifically, VMware Cloud on AWS customers will be able to rent Amazon EC2 bare metal instances, an AWS service that provides resizable compute capacity, that are accelerated by Nvidia T4 100 GPUs. The lynchpin of the hybrid platform is Nvidia's vComputeServer, virtual vGPU technology that enables GPU-accelerated deployment of workloads in virtual environments. The technology is not technically new but Nvidia has expanded support to VMware virtual environments including vSphere, vCenter and VMware cloud.

If you've ever found yourself wishing you could do all the things you've been able to do with a hypervisor and regular virtual machines but on a GPU cluster – in your own data center or in the cloud – Nvidia and VMware are now saying your wish is about to come true. Monday morning, in conjunction with the start of VMworld in San Francisco, the two companies announced that VMware Cloud on AWS, the VMware-operated cloud service running on bare-metal infrastructure in AWS data centers, will soon feature virtualized GPUs you'll be able to provision and manage using the same vSphere tools you use with regular VM infrastructure. You'll be able to share a single physical GPU among multiple VMs, but you'll also be able to aggregate the power of many GPUs to train a machine-learning model at massive scale, the companies said. Related: VMworld: Look at Acquisitions for Virtualization's Cloud Play The play here is to get VMware into the infrastructure mix for the emerging set of enterprise computing workloads that benefit from GPU acceleration, such as AI and machine learning, as well as more traditional Big Data analytics. Also on Monday, the company announced a broad strategy for tackling the hybrid cloud opportunity, which is essentially to provide a single set of tools for managing all enterprise infrastructure, on premises and/or in any public cloud, in a uniform way.