VMware and Nvidia have announced a pact at VMworld to make artificial intelligence (AI) a mass market. AI is entering a phase of maturity where its early adopters have discovered most of the glitches and devised a way to work around them. So virtual pioneer VMware has collaborated with graphics processing giant Nvidia (now part of Mellanox) to create a standard baseline platform on which all AI projects can be launched. Until now, the installation of AI has been far too complicated to attempt for any company that doesn't have global reach and the IT budgets to match. Companies need huge amounts of time and money to create the computing and network infrastructure on which to run all the software, host the data and process all the information, said Krish Prasad, VMware's cloud business SVP and general manager.

Today Mellanox announced that its RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) networking solutions for VMware vSphere enable virtualized Machine Learning solutions that achieve higher GPU utilization and efficiency. The benchmark was performed on a four-node cluster running vSphere 6.7 equipped with NVIDIA T4 GPUs with vCS software and Mellanox ConnectX-5 100 GbE SmartNICs, all connected by a Mellanox Spectrum SN2700 100 GbE switch. The PVRDMA Ethernet solution enables VM-to-VM communication over RDMA, which boosts data communication performance in virtualized environments while achieving significantly higher efficiency compared with legacy TCP/IP transports. Additionally, PVRDMA retains core virtual machine capabilities such as vMotion. This translates to real-world customer advantages including optimized server and GPU utilization, reduced machine learning training time and improved scalability.