OVH will offer Europe’s first cloud solution for deep learning and artificial intelligence
OVH will be one of the first cloud providers in Europe to offer the NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer with Tesla V100 GPU accelerators. OVH is going to offer this turnkey hardware and software system, purpose-built for machine learning, as an AI Infrastructure-as-a-Service option. By accessing supercomputing power only as needed, users can avoid high one-off costs or capital expenditure and instead focus on people, expertise and skills. This move strengthens OVH's position as an innovator and accelerator in the field of digital transformation.
The NVIDIA DGX-1 is a ready-to-use system with the performance of approximately 800 CPUs. It is specifically designed for mission-critical AI workloads such as deep learning, and is powered by NVIDIA’s latest GPU technology to deliver breakthrough performance, 96 times faster than CPU servers, and up to 3 times faster than prior generations. It features a Docker-based containerised deep learning framework registry, with software that is optimised by NVIDIA to deliver 30% faster deep learning training than comparable hardware alone – perfect for experimentation and development at the intersection of big data and AI. It also enables organisations to get the quickest start possible in deep learning, without having to worry about the IT infrastructure.
AI in the cloud
OVH works closely with major hardware vendors to provide its own cloud customers with the best, state-of-the-art technical solutions to meet their needs. OVH was one of the first providers on the market to offer its customers access to FPGA and NVMe technologies.
"As the European market leader in the cloud sector, OVH assists companies with their digital transformations. Artificial intelligence offers one of the greatest opportunities to achieve this change, but also presents a major challenge for infrastructures. With the NVIDIA DGX-1 option, OVH offers its customers the most powerful AI environment available, coupled with the benefits of the cloud infrastructure-as-a-service model. NVIDIA represents the pinnacle in GPU-accelerated AI supercomputing – and is therefore the right partner for us," said Germain Masse, Technical Director at OVH.
Huge potential for development and applications
The system can be used to train artificial neural networks. These systems learn to solve problems from huge amounts of data, the same way that humans learn from experience.
The NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning system offers unimaginable possibilities in the field of AI. Deep neural networks technology allows huge amounts of data (big data) to be analysed in a very short time. Data is arranged into layers that use increasingly complex characteristics to, for example, recognise the content of images. Large data sets (e.g. all videos on YouTube) are divided into categories. This allows new applications to be developed and used.
In addition to researchers, companies can benefit from the massive digitisation of everyday life, and develop new business opportunities as a result. OVH is now making this potential available via the cloud. This is an exciting option for all sectors with high data volumes, such as health or finance. Sensitive data is optimally protected at OVH: as a European company operating worldwide, it complies fully with the highest European data protection regulations (GDPR) and security certifications (including ISO/IEC 27001, SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II, PCI DSS and others).
“In every industry, artificial intelligence accelerated by GPU-computing has become the most important lever in enabling a business’s digital transformation,” explained Bart Schneider, Senior Director of CSP EMEA at NVIDIA. “OVH is putting the power of this new compute model at its customers’ fingertips, enabling them to innovate quickly and efficiently.”