(bright music) >> Well, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're here joined by Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. I'm John Furrrier, host of theCUBE. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, thanks for having me. >> So NVIDIA, obviously, great brand. Congratulations on all your continued success. Everyone who does anything in graphics knows that GPU's are hot, and you guys have a great brand, great success in the company. But AI and machine learning, we're seeing the trend significantly being powered by the GPU's and other systems. So it's a key part of everything. So what's the trends that you're seeing in ML and AI that's accelerating computing to the cloud? >> Yeah. I mean, AI is kind of driving breakthroughs and innovations across so many segments, so many different use cases. We see it showing up with things like credit card fraud prevention, and product and content recommendations. Really, it's the new engine behind search engines, is AI. People are applying AI to things like meeting transcriptions, virtual calls like this, using AI to actually capture what was said. And that gets applied in person-to-person interactions. We also see it in intelligence assistance for contact center automation, or chat bots, medical imaging, and intelligence stores, and warehouses, and everywhere. It's really amazing what AI has been demonstrating, what it can do, and its new use cases are showing up all the time. >> You know, Ian, I'd love to get your thoughts on how the world's evolved, just in the past few years alone, with cloud. And certainly, the pandemic's proven it. You had this whole kind of fullstack mindset, initially, and now you're seeing more of a horizontal scale, but yet, enabling this vertical specialization in applications. I mean, you mentioned some of those apps. The new enablers, this kind of, the horizontal play with enablement for, you know, specialization with data, this is a huge shift that's going on. It's been happening. What's your reaction to that? >> Yeah. The innovation's on two fronts. There's a horizontal front, which is basically the different kinds of neural networks or AIs, as well as machine learning techniques, that are just being invented by researchers and the community at large, including Amazon. You know, it started with these convolutional neural networks, which are great for image processing, but has expanded more recently into recurrent neural networks, transformer models, which are great for language and language and understanding, and then the new hot topic, graph neural networks, where the actual graph now is trained as a neural network. You have this underpinning of great AI technologies that are being invented around the world. NVIDIA's role is to try to productize that and provide a platform for people to do that innovation. And then, take the next step and innovate vertically. Take it and apply it to a particular field, like medical, like healthcare and medical imaging, applying AI so that radiologists can have an AI assistant with them and highlight different parts of the scan that may be troublesome or worrying, or require some more investigation. Using it for robotics, building virtual worlds where robots can be trained in a virtual environment, their AI being constantly trained and reinforced, and learn how to do certain activities and techniques. So that the first time it's ever downloaded into a real robot, it works right out of the box. To activate that, we are creating different vertical solutions, vertical stacks, vertical products, that talk the languages of those businesses, of those users. In medical imaging, it's processing medical data, which is obviously a very complicated, large format data, often three-dimensional voxels. In robotics, it's building, combining both our graphics and simulation technologies, along with the AI training capabilities and difference capabilities, in order to run in real time. Those are just two simple- >> Yeah, no. I mean, it's just so cutting-edge, it's so relevant. I mean, I think one of the things you mentioned about the neural networks, specifically, the graph neural networks, I mean, we saw, I mean, just go back to the late 2000s, how unstructured data, or object storage created, a lot of people realized a lot of value out of that. Now you got graph value, you got network effect, you got all kinds of new patterns. You guys have this notion of graph neural networks that's out there. What is a graph neural network, and what does it actually mean from a deep learning and an AI perspective? >> Yeah. I mean, a graph is exactly what it sounds like. You have points that are connected to each other, that establish relationships. In the example of Amazon.com, you might have buyers, distributors, sellers, and all of them are buying, or recommending, or selling different products. And they're represented in a graph. If I buy something from you and from you, I'm connected to those endpoints, and likewise, more deeply across a supply chain, or warehouse, or other buyers and sellers across the network. What's new right now is, that those connections now can be treated and trained like a neural network, understanding the relationship, how strong is that connection between that buyer and seller, or the distributor and supplier, and then build up a network to figure out and understand patterns across them. For example, what products I may like, 'cause I have this connection in my graph, what other products may meet those requirements? Or, also, identifying things like fraud, When patterns and buying patterns don't match what a graph neural networks should say would be the typical kind of graph connectivity, the different kind of weights and connections between the two, captured by the frequency of how often I buy things, or how I rate them or give them stars, or other such use cases. This application, graph neural networks, which is basically capturing the connections of all things with all people, especially in the world of e-commerce, is very exciting to a new application of applying AI to optimizing business, to reducing fraud, and letting us, you know, get access to the products that we want. They have our recommendations be things that excite us and want us to buy things, and buy more. >> That's a great setup for the real conversation that's going on here at re:Invent, which is new kinds of workloads are changing the game, people are refactoring their business with, not just re-platforming, but actually using this to identify value. And also, your cloud scale allows you to have the compute power to, you know, look at a note in an arc and actually code that. It's all science, it's all computer science, all at scale. So with that, that brings up the whole AWS relationship. Can you tell us how you're working with AWS, specifically? >> Yeah, AWS have been a great partner, and one of the first cloud providers to ever provide GPUs to the cloud. More recently, we've announced two new instances, the G5 instance, which is based on our A10G GPU, which supports the NVIDIA RTX technology, our rendering technology, for real-time ray tracing in graphics and game streaming. This is our highest performance graphics enhanced application, allows for those high-performance graphics applications to be directly hosted in the cloud. And, of course, runs everything else as well. It has access to our AI technology and runs all of our AI stacks. We also announced, with AWS, the G5 G instance. This is exciting because it's the first Graviton or Arm-based processor connected to a GPU and successful in the cloud. The focus here is Android gaming and machine learning inference. And we're excited to see the advancements that Amazon is making and AWS is making, with Arm in the cloud. And we're glad to be part of that journey. >> Well, congratulations. I remember, I was just watching my interview with James Hamilton from AWS 2013 and 2014. He was teasing this out, that they're going to build their own, get in there, and build their own connections to take that latency down and do other things. This is kind of the harvest of all that. As you start looking at these new interfaces, and the new servers, new technology that you guys are doing, you're enabling applications. What do you see this enabling? As this new capability comes out, new speed, more performance, but also, now it's enabling more capabilities so that new workloads can be realized. What would you say to folks who want to ask that question? >> Well, so first off, I think Arm is here to stay. We can see the growth and explosion of Arm, led of course, by Graviton and AWS, but many others. And by bringing all of NVIDIA's rendering graphics, machine learning and AI technologies to Arm, we can help bring that innovation that Arm allows, that open innovation, because there's an open architecture, to the entire ecosystem. We can help bring it forward to the state of the art in AI machine learning and graphics. All of our software that we release is both supportive, both on x86 and on Arm equally, and including all of our AI stacks. So most notably, for inference, the deployment of AI models, we have the NVIDIA Triton inference server. This is our inference serving software, where after you've trained a model, you want to deploy it at scale on any CPU, or GPU instance, for that matter. So we support both CPUs and GPUs with Triton. It's natively integrated with SageMaker and provides the benefit of all those performance optimizations. Features like dynamic batching, it supports all the different AI frameworks, from PyTorch to TensorFlow, even a generalized Python code. We're activating, and help activating, the Arm ecosystem, as well as bringing all those new AI use cases, and all those different performance levels with our partnership with AWS and all the different cloud instances. >> And you guys are making it really easy for people to use use the technology. That brings up the next, kind of, question I wanted to ask you. I mean, a lot of people are really going in, jumping in big-time into this. They're adopting AI, either they're moving it from prototype to production. There's always some gaps, whether it's, you know, knowledge, skills gaps, or whatever. But people are accelerating into the AI and leaning into it hard. What advancements has NVIDIA made to make it more accessible for people to move faster through the system, through the process? >> Yeah. It's one of the biggest challenges. You know, the promise of AI, all the publications that are coming out, all the great research, you know, how can you make it more accessible or easier to use by more people? Rather than just being an AI researcher, which is obviously a very challenging and interesting field, but not one that's directly connected to the business. NVIDIA is trying to provide a fullstack approach to AI. So as we discover or see these AI technologies become available, we produce SDKs to help activate them or connect them with developers around the world. We have over 150 different SDKs at this point, serving industries from gaming, to design, to life sciences, to earth sciences. We even have stuff to help simulate quantum computing. And of course, all the work we're doing with AI, 5G, and robotics. So we actually just introduced about 65 new updates, just this past month, on all those SDKs. Some of the newer stuff that's really exciting is the large language models. People are building some amazing AI that's capable of understanding the corpus of, like, human understanding. These language models that are trained on literally the content of the internet to provide general purpose or open-domain chatbots, so the customer is going to have a new kind of experience with the computer or the cloud. We're offering those large language models, as well as AI frameworks, to help companies take advantage of this new kind of technology. >> You know, Ian, every time I do an interview with NVIDIA or talk about NVIDIA, my kids and friends, first thing they say is, "Can you get me a good graphics card?" They all want the best thing in their rig. Obviously the gaming market's hot and known for that. But there's a huge software team behind NVIDIA. This is well-known. Your CEO is always talking about it on his keynotes. You're in the software business. And you do have hardware, you are integrating with Graviton and other things. But it's a software practice. This is software. This is all about software. >> Right. >> Can you share, kind of, more about how NVIDIA culture and their cloud culture, and specifically around the scale, I mean, you hit every use case. So what's the software culture there at NVIDIA? >> Yeah, NVIDIA's actually a bigger, we have more software people than hardware people. But people don't often realize this. And in fact, that it's because of, it just starts with the chip, and obviously, building great silicon is necessary to provide that level of innovation. But it's expanded dramatically from there. Not just the silicon and the GPU, but the server designs themselves. We actually do entire server designs ourselves, to help build out this infrastructure. We consume it and use it ourselves, and build our own supercomputers to use AI to improve our products. And then, all that software that we build on top, we make it available, as I mentioned before, as containers on our NGC container store, container registry, which is accessible from AWS, to connect to those vertical markets. Instead of just opening up the hardware and letting the ecosystem develop on it, they can, with the low-level and programmatic stacks that we provide with CUDA. We believe that those vertical stacks are the ways we can help accelerate and advance AI. And that's why we make them so available. >> And programmable software is so much easier. I want to get that plug in for, I think it's worth noting that you guys are heavy hardcore, especially on the AI side, and it's worth calling out. Getting back to the customers who are bridging that gap and getting out there, what are the metrics they should consider as they're deploying AI? What are success metrics? What does success look like? Can you share any insight into what they should be thinking about, and looking at how they're doing? >> Yeah. For training, it's all about time-to-solution. It's not the hardware that's the cost, it's the opportunity that AI can provide to your business, and the productivity of those data scientists which are developing them, which are not easy to come by. So what we hear from customers is they need a fast time-to-solution to allow people to prototype very quickly, to train a model to convergence, to get into production quickly, and of course, move on to the next or continue to refine it. >> John Furrier: Often. >> So in training, it's time-to-solution. For inference, it's about your ability to deploy at scale. Often people need to have real-time requirements. They want to run in a certain amount of latency, in a certain amount of time. And typically, most companies don't have a single AI model. They have a collection of them they want to run for a single service or across multiple services. That's where you can aggregate some of your infrastructure. Leveraging the Triton inference server, I mentioned before, can actually run multiple models on a single GPU saving costs, optimizing for efficiency, yet still meeting the requirements for latency and the real-time experience, so that our customers have a good interaction with the AI. >> Awesome. Great. Let's get into the customer examples. You guys have, obviously, great customers. Can you share some of the use cases examples with customers, notable customers? >> Yeah. One great part about working at NVIDIA is, as technology company, you get to engage with such amazing customers across many verticals. Some of the ones that are pretty exciting right now, Netflix is using the G4 instances to do a video effects and animation content from anywhere in the world, in the cloud, as a cloud creation content platform. We work in the energy field. Siemens energy is actually using AI combined with simulation to do predictive maintenance on their energy plants, preventing, or optimizing, onsite inspection activities and eliminating downtime, which is saving a lot of money for the energy industry. We have worked with Oxford University. Oxford University actually has over 20 million artifacts and specimens and collections, across its gardens and museums and libraries. They're actually using NVIDIA GPU's and Amazon to do enhanced image recognition to classify all these things, which would take literally years going through manually, each of these artifacts. Using AI, we can quickly catalog all of them and connect them with their users. Great stories across graphics, across industries, across research, that it's just so exciting to see what people are doing with our technology, together with Amazon. >> Ian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. A lot of great content there. We probably could go another hour. All the great stuff going on at NVIDIA. Any closing remarks you want to share, as we wrap this last minute up? >> You know, really what NVIDIA's about, is accelerating cloud computing. Whether it be AI, machine learning, graphics, or high-performance computing and simulation. And AWS was one of the first with this, in the beginning, and they continue to bring out great instances to help connect the cloud and accelerated computing with all the different opportunities. The integrations with EC2, with SageMaker, with EKS, and ECS. The new instances with G5 and G5 G. Very excited to see all the work that we're doing together. >> Ian Buck, general manager and vice president of Accelerated Computing. I mean, how can you not love that title? We want more power, more faster, come on. More computing. No one's going to complain with more computing. Ian, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching Amazon coverage re:Invent 2021. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>we'll go back to the cubes. Coverage of the age of US Executive Summit at Davis. Reinvent made possible by Accenture My name is Dave Volunteer. We're gonna talk about the arm nation advantage, embraced the future of productivity, improve speed quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. And we herewith Bhaskar goes, Who's the chief strategy Officer X censure in Rajendra RP Prasad is the senior managing director in Global Automation. The Accenture guys walk into the Cube. Get to seal. >>Thank you. >>Hey, congratulations on the new book. I know it's like giving birth, but it's a mini version. If the well, the automation advantage embraced a future of productivity, improve speed, quality and customer experience to artificial intelligence. What inspired you to write this book? Can you tell us a little bit more about it and how businesses are going to be able to take advantage of the information that's in there? Maybe you could start, >>so I think you know, if we say that what inspired as primarily the two things really style, you know, over inspired have to start this project in first of all is the technology change step change in the technology. Second is the mile maturity of the buyer maturity of the market when it's a little more, you know, when I talk about the technology change, automation is nothing new in the industry. In the starting from the Industrial Revolution, always, industry adopted the automation. But last few years would happen. That there is a significant change in the technology in terms of not of new technologies are coming together like cloud data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and they are gearing match you, and that created a huge opportunity in the industry. So that is number one second if fighting the maturity of the buyer. So buyers are always buying automation, adopting the automation. So when I talked to this different by a different industrial wire, suddenly we realise they're not asking about workings automation, how that will help. But primarily they're talking about how they can scaling. They have all have done the pilot, the prototype, how they can take the full advantage in their enterprise through scheme and talking to few client few of our clients, and he realised that it's best to write this boat and film all our clients to take advantage of this new technologies to skill up their business. If I give a little more than inside that one, exactly we are trying to do in this boat primarily, we dealt with three things. One is the individual automation which deals with the human efficiency. Second is the industrial automation who visited a group efficiency. And third is the intelligent automation. We deal city business, official efficiency while business value. So we believe that this is what will really change their business and help our client help the automation. It users to really make clear an impact in their business. >>Yeah, And so you talked about that? The maturity of the customer. And and I like the way you should describe that spectrum ending with intelligent automation. So the point is you not just paving the cow path, if you will, automating processes that maybe were invented decades ago. You're really trying to rethink the best approach. And that's where you going to get the most business value, our peace In thinking about the maturity, I think the a pre pandemic people were maybe a little reluctant s Bhaskar was saying maybe needed some education. But But how? If things change me, obviously the penned Emmick has had a huge impact. It's accelerated things, but but what's changed in the business environment? In terms of the need to implement automation? R. P >>thank you Well, that is an excellent question. As even through the pandemic, most of the enterprises accelerated what I call as the digital transformation, technology transformation and the war all time that it takes to do. The transformation is compressed in our most land prices. Now do compress transformation. The core of it is innovation and innovation, led technology and technology based solutions. To drive this transformation automation. Artificial intelligence becomes hot of what we do while we are implementing this accelerators. Innovation enablers within the enterprises, most of the enterprises prior to the pandemic we're looking automation and I as a solution for cost efficiency. Saving cost in DePina deriving capacity efficiency does if they do the transformation when we press the fast forward but draw the transformation journey liberating automation. What happens is most of the enterprises which the focus from cost efficiency to speed to market application availability and system resiliency at the core. When I speaking to most of the sea woes Corrine Wall in the tech transformation they have now embrace automation and air as a Conan able to bribe this journeys towards, you know, growth, innovation, lead application, availability and transformation and sustainability of the applications through the are A book addresses all of these aspects, including the most important element of which is compute storeys and the enablement that it can accomplish through cloud transformation, cloud computing services and how I I and Michelle learning take log technologies can in a benefit from transformation to the block. In addition, we also heard person talk about automation in the cloud zero automation taking journey towards the cloud on automation Once you're in the clouds, water the philosophy and principles he should be following to drive the motivation. We also provide holy holistic approach to dry automation by focusing process technology that includes talent and change management and also addressing automation culture for the organisations in the way they work as they go forward. >>You mentioned a couple things computing, storage and when we look at our surveys, guys is it is interesting to see em, especially since the pandemic, four items have popped up where all the spending momentum is cloud province reasons scale and in resource and, you know, be able the report to remotely containers because a lot of people have work loads on Prem that they just can automatically move in the company, want to do development in the cloud and maybe connect to some of those on from work clothes. R P A. Which is underscores automation in, of course, and R. P. You mentioned a computing storage and, of course, the other pieces. Data's We have always data, but so my question is, how has the cloud and eight of us specifically influenced changes in automation? In a >>brilliant question and brilliant point, I say no winner. I talked to my clients. One of the things that I always says, Yeah, I I is nothing but y for the data that is the of the data. So that date of place underlying a very critical part of applying intelligence, artificial intelligence and I in the organization's right as the organisation move along their automation journey. Like you said, promoting process automation to contain a realisation to establishing data, building the data cubes and managing the massive data leveraging cloud and how Yebda please can help in a significant way to help the data stratification Dana Enablement data analysis and not data clustering classification All aspects of the what we need to do within the between the data space that helps for the Lord scale automation effort, the cloud and and ablest place a significant role to help accelerate and enable the data part. Once you do that, building mission learning models on the top of it liberating containers clusters develops techniques to drive, you know the principles on the top of it is very makes it easier to drive that on foster enablement advancement through cloud technologists. Alternatively, using automation itself to come enable the cloud transformation data transformation data migration aspects to manage the complexity, speed and scale is very important. The book stresses the very importance of fuelling the motion of the entire organisation to agility, embracing new development methods like automation in the cloud develops Davis a cop's and the importance of oral cloud adoptions that bills the foundational elements of, you know, making sure you're automation and air capabilities are established in a way that it is scalable and sustainable within the organisations as they move forward, >>Right? Thank you for that r p vast crime want to come back to this notion of maturity and and just quite automation. So Andy Jossy made the phrase undifferentiated, heavy lifting popular. But that was largely last decade. Apply to it. And now we're talking about deeper business integration. And so you know, automation certainly is solves the problem of Okay, I can take Monday and cast like provisioning storage in compute and automate that great. But what is some of the business problems, that deeper business integration that we're solving through things? And I want to use the phrase they used earlier intelligent automation? What is that? Can you give an example? >>Let's a very good question as we said, that the automation is a journey, you know, if we talk to any blind, so everybody wants to use data and artificial intelligence to transform their business, so that is very simple. But the point is that you cannot reach their anti unless you follow the steps. So in our book, we have explained that the process that means you know, we defined in a five steps. We said that everybody has to follow the foundation, which is primarily tools driven optimise, which is process drivel. An official see improvement, which is primarily are driven. Then comes predictive capability, the organisation, which is data driven, and then intelligence, which is primarily artificial intelligence driven. Now, when I talked about the use of artificial intelligence and this new intelligent in the business, what the what I mean is basically improved decision making in every level in the organisation and give the example. We have given multiple example in this, both in a very simple example, if I take suppose, a financial secretary organisation, they're selling wealth management product to the client, so they have a number of management product, and they have number of their number of clients a different profile. But now what is happening? This artificial intelligence is helping their agents to target the night product for the night customers. So then, at the success rate is very high. So that is a change that is a change in the way they do business. Now some of the platform companies like Amazon on Netflix. He will see that this this killed is a very native skill for them. They used the artificial intelligence try to use everywhere, but there a lot of other companies who are trying to adopt this killed today. Their fundamental problem is they do not have the right data. They do not have the capability. They do not have all the processes so that they can inject the decision making artificial intelligence capability in every decision making to empower their workforce. And that is what we have written in this book. To provide the guidance to this in this book. How they can use the better business decision improved the create, the more business value using artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. >>Interesting. Bhaskar are gonna stay with you, you know, in their book in the middle of last decade, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee wrote the second Machine Age, and they made a point in the book that machines have always replaced humans in instead of various tasks. But for the first time ever, we're seeing machines replacing human in cognitive task that scares a lot of people so hardy you inspire employees to embrace the change that automation can bring. What what are you seeing is the best ways to do that? >>This is a very good question. The intelligent automation implementation is not, Iet Project is primarily change management. It's primarily change in the culture, the people in the organisation into embrace this change and how they will get empowered with the machine. It is not about the replacing people by machine, which has happened historically into the earlier stages of automation, which I explained. But in this intelligent automation, it is basically empowering people to do the better. Dwelled the example. That is the thing we have written in the book about about a newspaper, 100 years old newspaper in Italy. And you know, this industry has gone through multiple automation and changes black and white printing, printing to digital. Everything happened. And now what is happening? They're using artificial intelligence, so they're writers are using those technologies to write faster. So when they are writing immediately, they're getting supported with the later they're supporting with the related article they are supporting with this script, even they're supported to the heading of this article. So the question is that it is not replacing the news, you know, the content writer, but is basically empowering them so that they can produce the better quality of product they can, better writing in a faster time. So is very different approach and that is why is, um, needs a change management and it's a cultural change. >>Garden R P What's it for me? Why should we read the automation advantage? Maybe you can talk about some of the key takeaways and, you know, maybe the best places to start on an automation journey. >>Very will cut the fastest MP, Newer automation journey and Claude Adoption Journey is to start simple and start right if you know what's have free one of the process, Guru says, If you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you, so to start right, a company needs to know where they are on a map today, identify the right focus areas, create a clear roadmap and then move forward with the structured approach for successful our option. The other important element is if you automate an inefficient process, we are going to make your inefficiency run more efficiently. So it is very important to baseline, and then I established the baseline and know very or on the journey map. This is one of the key teams we discuss in the Automation Advantis book, with principles and tips and real world examples on how to approach each of these stages. We also stress the importance of building the right architecture is for intelligent automation, cloud enablement, security at the core of automation and the platform centric approach. Leading enterprises can fade out adopters and Iraq, whether they are in the early stages of the automation, journey or surrender advanced stage the formation journey. They can look at the automation advantage book and build and take the best practises and and what is provided as a practical tips within the book to drive there. Automation journey. This also includes importance of having right partners in the cloud space, like a loveliest who can accelerate automation, journey and making sure accompanies cloud migration. Strategy includes automation, automation, lead, yea and data as part of their journey. Management. >>That's great. Good advice there. Bring us home. Maybe you can wrap it up with the final final world. >>So, lefty, keep it very simple. This book will help you to create difference in your business with the power of automation and artificial intelligence. >>That's a simple message and will governor what industry you're in? There is a disruptions scenario for your industry and that disruption scenarios going to involve automation, so you better get ahead of editor game. They're The book is available, of course, at amazon dot com. You can get more information. X censure dot com slash automation advantage. Gosh, thanks so much for coming in the Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. >>Eh? Thank you for watching this episode of the eight of US Executive Summit of reinvent made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more discussions that educating spy inspire You're watching the queue.