HPE Discover 2022

For the last few years, we have had to enjoy HPE Discover from the comfort of our homes. This year we are back in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2022, as the “Edge-to-Cloud” conference. However, I must say that I did miss the interaction with customers, colleagues, and competitors.

Every HPE Discover, I learned something new, met new people, or caught up on what other people have done in the industry. We are looking forward to seeing everybody again at HPE Discover.

At HighFens, a consulting & services firm operating in the HPC & AI market, we want to share our knowledge and what we have been up to since our past presentations at HPE Discover.

Our focus at HPE Discover 2022 is the topic of “AI Solutions” and why Enterprises are considering introducing them in their organizations.

We have prepared three sessions around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the role HPE plays in our customer solutions. All the sessions are in the Content Catalog. Search for “HighFens” to find our sessions.

AI Solutions

Artificial Intelligence (AI) defines the future of every industry and business service at all levels. The competitiveness in the market is forcing many Enterprises towards the introduction and acceleration of AI. However, an AI transformation is a complex journey. Moving towards a data-centric approach can be challenging from a cultural, technical, and operational perspective.

AI Solutions help with many of the challenges by introducing a well-defined ecosystem. The ecosystem has all the ingredients to accelerate the AI journey and achieve the goals of both data scientists and business leaders.

Session overview

We will present three sessions chronologically and allow attendees to get up to speed on AI as we go along. There is a lot of misunderstanding and hype around AI. Our goal is to clarify what AI is and how Enterprises are using AI-based on customer conversations. Additionally, we will present AI customer solutions deployment with HPE infrastructure.

• The first session is an introduction to AI and aims to set a baseline understanding of what AI is (and is not).
• The second session represents a typical conversation we have with Enterprises when they are looking for a scalable AI solution. A conversation about their short and long-term goals and where they are in their AI transformation journey. We discuss the challenges and trends of AI solutions that will help them make the right choices and fulfill their goals.
• The third session explores the architecture behind modern AI solutions at scale

Figure 1 shows the timetable for each session.

Figure 1 – HighFens Inc. Session overview

Session 1 – Introduction to AI

Session: “Introduction to AI.”

Organizations use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate their Digital Transformation. Therefore, AI is a critical factor in the survival of modern Enterprises. The session introduces AI, Deep Learning (DL), and Machine Learning (ML).

You will learn about terminology and definitions used in AI and the essential differences between ML and DL.

Some of the questions addressed in this session are:

• Why AI?
• What is the difference between Training and Inference?
• What is a pipeline?
• What is a neural network?
• Why can’t we always use DL?

The second half of the presentation focuses on the state of AI in the enterprise. The base of the discussion is the study by the “Emerald Research Group” sponsored by HPE (2021).

• Why do businesses succeed while others struggle to realize their AI value?
• How do technology investments and data impact a successful AI strategy?
• What are common misperceptions across the AI journey?

Session 2 – Challenges and Trends of Scalable AI Solutions

Session: “Challenges and Trends of Scalable AI Solutions.”

Organizations must deploy scalable AI solutions for ML and DL workloads to innovate and stay competitive. We will discuss the trends and challenges associated with modern AI Solutions.

The session reflects our conversations with customers and outlines the challenges they experience. Additionally, we talk about the trends we see in the industry when building large-scale AI solutions.

AI is all about the process of continuous learning and accentuates the need for scalability with a predictable ROI.

The second part of the session will discuss end-to-end solutions based on HPE infrastructure deployed at customers. The solutions include HPE servers, NVIDIA GPUs, and Weka’s (an HPE partner) high-performance file system.

Session 3 – AI Data Flow – Keeping the GPUs fed in your HPE system

Session: “AI Data Flow—Keeping the GPUs Fed in Your HPE System.”

In this session, we deep dive into what modern architectures for scalable AI solutions look like.

The compute accelerators deliver a considerable compute power that relies on low latency networks and fast storage to provide data to and from the accelerators. In addition, accelerators such as NVIDIA GPUs are popular ingredients of AI solutions. Therefore, it is critical to include architectural decisions to accommodate the needs of those accelerators.

AI solutions need Big Data and big processing, but how do you bridge the gap between the data lake and the GPU processors?

New RDMA (Remote direct memory access) /RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) storage protocols bypassing the CPU can feed data directly to the GPU and drastically change and improve the path between storage and GPU. Join this session to understand the improvements in PCIe and Infiniband that will help determine your GPU cluster’s performance.

We look forward to HPE Discover 2022 and connecting with current and future customers. Join our sessions at HPE Discover if you want to learn more about AI and AI solutions with HPE.

We welcome feedback on our sessions or topics for future sessions.

Additionally, I am a co-host of “Utilizing AI”, a podcast focusing on AI in the Enterprise. We discuss various AI topics and always looking to expand our horizons. To learn more about the podcasts, follow us here.