Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced that it has acquired Determined AI, a San Francisco-based startup with a software stack designed to train AI models faster using its open source machine learning (ML) platform.
HPE will combine Determined AI’s \software solution with its AI and high performance computing (HPC) offerings to enable ML engineers to implement and train machine learning models to provide faster and more accurate insights from their data in almost every industry.
“As we enter the Age of Insight, our customers recognize the need to add machine learning to deliver better and faster answers from their data,” said Justin Hotard, HPE SVP/GM, HPC and Mission Critical Solutions. “AI-powered technologies will play an increasingly critical role in turning data into readily available, actionable information to fuel this new era. Determined AI’s unique open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family.”
Building and training optimized machine learning models at scale is considered a demanding and critical stage of ML development, and doing it well increasingly requires researchers and scientists to face many challenges frequently found in HPC. These include properly setting up and managing a highly parallel software ecosystem and infrastructure spanning specialized compute, storage, fabric and accelerators. Additionally, users need to program, schedule and train their models efficiently to maximize the utilization of the highly specialized infrastructure they have set up, creating complexity and slowing down productivity.
Determined AI’s open source machine learning training platform closes this gap to help researchers and scientists to focus on innovation and accelerate their time to delivery by removing the complexity and cost associated with machine learning development. This includes making it easy to set-up, configure, manage and share workstations or AI clusters that run on-premises or in the cloud.
Determined AI also makes it easier and faster for users to train their models through a range of capabilities that significantly speed up training, which in one use case related to drug discovery, went from three days to three hours. These capabilities include accelerator scheduling, fault tolerance, high speed parallel and distributed training of models, advanced hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search, reproducible collaboration and metrics tracking.
“The Determined AI team is excited to join HPE, who shares our vision to realize the potential of AI,” said Evan Sparks, CEO of Determined AI. “Over the last several years, building AI applications has become extremely compute, data, and communication intensive. By combining with HPE’s industry-leading HPC and AI solutions, we can accelerate our mission to build cutting edge AI applications and significantly expand our customer reach.”
AI training is continuing to fuel projects and innovation with intelligence, and to do so effectively, and at scale, will require specialized computing. According to IDC, the accelerated AI server market, which plays an integral role in providing targeted capabilities for image and data-intensive training, is expected to grow by 28 percent each year and reach $18B by 2024.
The massive computing power of HPC is also increasingly being used to train and optimize AI models, in addition to combining with AI to augment workloads such as modeling and simulation, which are well-established tools to speed time-to-discovery. Intersect360 Research notes that the HPC market will grow by more than 40 percent, reaching almost $55 billion in revenue by 2024.
To tackle the growing complexity of AI with faster time-to-market, HPE is committed to continue delivering advanced and diverse HPC solutions to train machine learning models and optimize applications for any AI need, in any environment. By combining Determined AI’s open source capabilities, HPE is furthering its mission in making AI heterogeneous and empowering ML engineers to build AI models at a greater scale.
Additionally, through HPE GreenLake cloud services for High Performance Computing (HPC), HPE is making HPC and AI solutions even more accessible and affordable to the commercial market with fully managed services that can run in a customer’s data center, in a colocation or at the edge using the HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform.
Determined AI was founded in 2017 by Neil Conway, Evan Sparks, and Ameet Talwalkar, and based in San Francisco. It launched its open-source platform in 2020, and as a result of its focus on model training, Determined AI has quickly emerged as a leading player in the evolving machine learning software ecosystem. Its solution has been adopted by customers across a wide range of industries, such as biopharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles, defense contracting, and manufacturing.
Determined AI is an early stage company at the forefront of machine learning technology by helping customers leverage high-performance computing without expertise or staffing. Determined AI provides an open source machine learning solution that speeds up time-to-market by increasing developer productivity, improving resource utilization and reducing risk.
