In the rapidly evolving field of AI and machine learning, there’s a growing need for tools that can enhance efficiency and effectiveness in the development process. With LLMs being an essential component of GenAI, enterprises are looking for an easy button to integrate models into their day-to-day workflows.
Dell Precision AI-ready workstations, in combination with the NVIDIA AI Workbench enterprise-ready toolkit—recently made generally available at NVIDIA GTC—represent a powerful solution to address the challenges developers face in setting up, managing and scaling their AI projects and play an integral role in the newly announced Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA.
Key Challenges
AI developers and data scientists encounter various challenges that impede model development and collaboration, hampering efforts in model creation, customization and training. A few of the key challenges include:
-
- Hardware setup. Configuring hardware for deep learning and GenAI tasks is typically intricate and technical, involving multiple steps that consume developers’ time and resources, diverting their focus from actual model development.
- Portability freedom. Achieving the flexibility to migrate developments and workloads to different locations requires substantial effort and technical proficiency. Challenges encountered on the source machine may resurface on the target, particularly if the environment is different. Dependencies and variables play a crucial role in determining how projects perform across diverse environments.
- Workflow management. Identifying, installing and managing elements of AI workflows requires many cycles. Developers are faced with manually tracking project elements, and the lack of automation and user-friendly interfaces impact productivity.
NVIDIA Tools for Developers
NVIDIA provides a rich ecosystem of tools through NVIDIA AI Enterprise, available today through Dell—an end-to-end software platform designed to accelerate data science pipelines and simplify the development and deployment of AI applications. With best-in-class development tools, frameworks and pre-trained models, enterprises using NVIDIA AI Enterprise software can seamlessly move from pilot phases to full-scale production. New NVIDIA microservices, including NVIDIA NIM for inference and NeMo Retriever for retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, are supported on Dell Precision AI-ready workstations, giving developers incredible flexibility in building and running production-grade enterprise AI. This capability, paired with Precision workstations, is extremely effective in developing, testing and collaborating on AI projects within the Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA. AI Enterprise can seamlessly move from the Precision on the desktop to PowerScale AI servers in the data center or private cloud, and easily scale to full production.
In addition, the newly announced general availability of NVIDIA AI Workbench addresses developer challenges by providing a platform for reproducibility and portability. GenAI developers and data scientists can fine-tune, customize and deploy large language models across GPU-enabled environments. Whether users are starting locally on an NVIDIA RTX-powered workstation or scaling out to a data center or cloud instance via NVIDIA AI Enterprise, AI Workbench streamlines selecting foundation models, building the project environment and fine-tuning these models with domain-specific data. By removing the complexity of technical tasks that may confound experts or hinder novices, AI Workbench makes AI development accessible to every software coder. The platform offers several features and benefits:
-
- Easy setup. AI Workbench streamlines the setup and configuration of GPU-accelerated hardware, automating software and driver installation which allows for optimal Jupyter Notebook setup for workstations.
- Automation. The platform automates workflows across infrastructure, from deskside to data center technology environments, including multicloud, enabling developers to reproduce, collaborate and easily port their work anywhere to any platform, for optimal scale, speed and cost.
- Greater productivity. By automating installation and streamlining access to popular repositories like Hugging Face, GitHub and NVIDIA NGC, developers can focus on execution and manage interactive project workflows across the enterprise development environment.
Powering AI Development
Dell Precision AI-ready workstations equipped with NVIDIA RTX™ professional GPUs and paired with NVIDIA AI Workbench play a critical role in AI infrastructures. Workstations provide an ideal foundation for developing and deploying AI models locally. As the world’s number one workstation brand,* Precision workstations offer a comprehensive selection of AI-ready devices, allowing businesses to capitalize on opportunities to drive innovation. Precision workstation platforms, from mobile to tower form factors, provide several key advantages:
-
- Simplified. Precision workstations simplify the AI journey by enabling software developers and data scientists to prototype, develop and fine-tune GenAI models locally on the device.
- Local environment and control. Within a sandbox environment, developers have full control over the configuration and resources, allowing for easy customization and upgrades. This provides for predictability, which is crucial for informed decision-making and builds confidence in the AI models.
- Tailored and scalable. Depending on the requirements for GenAI workloads, workstations can be designed and configured to support up to four NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation GPUs in a single unit, such as the Precision 7960 Tower. This provides users with substantial performance across their AI projects and streamlines both training and development phases.
- Trusted. Running AI workloads at the deskside allows for data to stay on-premises, providing greater control over data access and minimizing the potential exposure of proprietary information.
Partnering for Success
Dell Technologies, in collaboration with NVIDIA, is at the forefront of AI, providing the technology that makes tomorrow possible, today. Together, NVIDIA AI Workbench and Dell Precision AI-ready workstations unlock a new array of tools and resources that are designed to expedite the AI journey from deskside to data center.
Join us on this exciting trek and unleash your full potential with AI. Learn more about Dell Precision workstations and find AI-ready configurations here and get started with NVIDIA AI Workbench here.
*Source: IDC Quarterly Workstation Tracker, Q4 2023.
