NVIDIA announced on Monday that its new hosted AI development hub — the NVIDIA Base Command Platform — is now available to North American customers after debuting in May.
NVIDIA said in a statement that the platform “provides enterprises with instant access to powerful computing infrastructure wherever their data resides.”
The tool is available to be rented for a monthly subscription price of $90,000. There is a three-month minimum to all subscriptions, NVIDIA explained.
Manuvir Das, head of Enterprise Computing at NVIDIA, said the Base Command Platform makes it easy for enterprises to instantly access the power of an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to “accelerate the AI and data science development lifecycle.”
The platform gives companies access to NVIDIA DGX SuperPODTM supercomputers through optimized AI workflow software, and the tool is hosted remotely by Equinix. According to a statement from the company, the Base Command Platform is the first NVIDIA-powered hybrid cloud offering available through the NVIDIA AI LaunchPad partner program.
The tool is tailored for organizations that have large-scale, multiuser and multi-team AI workflows looking to push AI projects into production.
NVIDIA announced that Adobe was already using the tool to help researchers and data scientists work “simultaneously on shared accelerated computing resources to speed up the development of new AI-powered software features and applications.”
Abhay Parasnis, CTO and chief product officer at Adobe, said the platform requires little effort to onboard AI developers.
“Our team is exploring the potential of Base Command Platform to simplify the machine learning development workflow,” Parasnis said.
The tool is supported by a number of NVIDIA partner organizations like NetApp and Equinix, and Weights and Biases, which offers MLOps software for the Base Command Platform.
In addition to a cloud-based user interface, the tool comes with a command-line API, integrated monitoring and reporting dashboards to accelerate the AI development lifecycle, incorporating a “broad range of AI and data science tools” like the NVIDIA NGCTM catalog of AI and analytics software.
Equinix vice president Steve Steinhilber added that businesses often struggle to provide the simple yet powerful digital infrastructure that researchers and scientists can share efficiently when it comes to AI.
The Base Command Platform is “the fastest and most cost-effective way to tap into the leading performance of an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to accelerate AI development, seamlessly access distributed data lakes wherever they may be located via Equinix Fabric, and quickly deploy developed and tested algorithms to inference engines all over the world,” Steinhilber explained.
Kim Stevenson, senior vice president and general manager of the foundational data services group at NetApp, noted that the tool was a cloud-hosted solution for end-to-end AI development with fully managed AI infrastructure.
“Enterprises want to simplify AI experimentation and streamline workflow management across teams of users and jobs,” Stevenson said.
