Thierry Pellegrino is VP of Business Strategy & HPC Solutions at Dell EMC.
In this video from the GPU Technology Conference, Thierry Pellegrino describes how Dell EMC customers are applying HPC technologies to AI workloads.
insideHPC: Hi. I’m Rich with insideHPC. We’re at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley, and I’m here with Thierry from Dell Technologies. Thierry, you know, we’re, we’re old school kind of HPC guys around here, but this AI stuff we’re hearing about, i-it’s already been kind of done, hasn’t it?
Thierry Pellegrino: Well, the AI stuff is kind of the new buzz word. And what a lot of people get excited today is the fact that you can really do more HPC with the technology you have today. We’ve seen amazing news between Dell Technology announcements, NVIDIA announcements and others today in Silicon Valley. But that makes all this high performance computational activity possible, where people have been doing HPC forever.
insideHPC: Okay. What other kind of use cases are you seeing, Thierry?
AeroFarms grows food in controlled environments with help from AI and Dell EMC.
Thierry Pellegrino: I’ll just mention one of our customers, AeroFarms, who use a lot of our technology in order to bring the value of IoT into an environment where you can do machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence, and automatically grow crops in an environment that you would never think it would be possible.
Just think about New York, that’s not usually where you see a lot of crops growing. But today, you can be in an enclosed environment where it’s all controlled. You don’t even have soil; you grow your seeds and those seeds are being analyzed by multi-spectral cameras, and the data that you capture out of that gets sent to an environment that’s gonna crunch the data, react real-time, and help improve the crop. So customers will have fantastically grown fruits and vegetables without any pesticides, everything controlled, and you can increase your yield and feed a lot more people around the planet. And this is an example where you see the HPC knowledge applied in real-life workflows.
insideHPC: So, if this machine can look at the plant and see what it’s doing and understand what that image or that specific kind of green is, what that means, and what that plant needs– it can make a better crop, can’t it?
Thierry Pellegrino: Yeah, that’s the concept. I mean, you could still make a crop out of planting a seed in backyard. But if you have to feed a growing population around the world, especially in areas where the population is growing, farming technology needs to go deeper and further, and this is a good alternative.
insideHPC: As you know, we’re in HPC and we’re trying to help make the world be a better place. There’s a lot of challenges out there, and it’s great to see companies like Dell and NVIDIA working together to make that happen. So thanks for sharing that with us today.
Thierry Pellegrino: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Rich.
