NVIDIA, Google Cloud to Create Industry’s First AI-on-5G Lab

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Mobile World Congress—NVIDIA announced that it is partnering with Google Cloud to establish the industry’s first AI-on-5G Innovation Lab, enabling network infrastructure players and AI software partners to develop, test and adopt solutions that will help accelerate the creation of smart cities, smart factories and other advanced 5G and AI applications.

The lab will provide enterprises with access to Google Cloud’s Anthos platform and NVIDIA accelerated computing hardware and software platforms that let them harness data and AI to drive business performance, improve operational efficiency and optimize safety and reliability. The companies will begin development in the second half of the year.

“The global telecommunications industry is undergoing a sweeping transformation as the speed and low latency of 5G create unprecedented opportunities to deliver AI-on-5G at the enterprise edge,” said Ronnie Vasishta, senior vice president of Telecom at NVIDIA. “Our collaboration with Google Cloud will help network operators and infrastructure players conceive and create new profit centers built on AI and machine learning.”

Growing AI-on-5G Ecosystem

NVIDIA announced in April it is teaming with Google Cloud, Fujitsu, Mavenir, Radisys and Wind River to develop solutions for NVIDIA’s AI-on-5G platform. Google Cloud is extending the Anthos application platform to the network edge, allowing telecommunications service providers and enterprises to rapidly deliver new services and applications at the 5G edge.

“Google Cloud, with our Anthos application platform, is enabling service providers and enterprises across many vertical markets to connect seamlessly over 5G at the network edge,” said Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager for Networking at Google Cloud. “We’re excited to extend our collaboration with NVIDIA to deliver a joint innovation lab that provides the infrastructure required for enterprises, communications service providers and partners to develop, test and deploy their edge AI applications.”

Anthos offers a consistent platform for application deployments, with a service-centric view of each environment. The platform enables customers to build and deploy enterprise-grade, containerized applications faster with managed Kubernetes in the cloud, on premises and at the network edge.

Anthos supports NVIDIA GPU-accelerated servers, enabling a consistent deployment and operational experience across deployments, while reducing expensive overhead and improving developer productivity. The platform also protects applications and software supply chains and provides an outcome-focused approach to managing policies for applications across environments — a critical feature for network operators and enterprises delivering AI on 5G.

NVIDIA Hardware and Software Development

NVIDIA AI-on-5G provides enterprises, mobile network operators and cloud service providers a single, converged platform for handling both 5G and edge AI computing. The platform uses the NVIDIA Aerial™ software development kit with the NVIDIA BlueField®-2 A100 — a converged card that combines GPUs and DPUs as well as NVIDIA’s “5T for 5G” solution. This allows for the creation of high-performance 5G RAN and AI applications to manage precision manufacturing robots, automated guided vehicles, drones, wireless cameras, self-checkout aisles and hundreds of other transformational projects.

The NVIDIA Aerial SDK, in combination with the AI frameworks NVIDIA Metropolis for smart cities, NVIDIA Isaac™ for autonomous machines and NVIDIA Clara™ for healthcare, is an integral part of the AI-on-5G ecosystem and can be deployed on a single NVIDIA-Certified System™.

In related news today, NVIDIA announced its next-generation Aerial A100 AI-on-5G computing platform will incorporate 16 Arm-based CPU cores into the NVIDIA BlueField-3 A100. This results in a self-contained, converged card that delivers enterprise edge AI applications over cloud-native 5G vRAN with improved performance per watt and faster time to deployment.

These solutions will be available for testing and validation in the AI-on-5G lab.

NVIDIA AI-on-5G Data Centers — From Edge to the Cloud

Software-defined RANs are critical for building a modern 5G infrastructure that is capable of running a range of applications on a common platform. NVIDIA Aerial enables the best possible utilization by providing elasticity as network traffic changes throughout the day and the flexibility to offer services based on dynamic customer needs.

The NVIDIA EGX™ platform offered by OEMs through NVIDIA-Certified Systems brings AI computing capabilities to the edge, where data gets created. Expanding on the platform, server makers also can pair NVIDIA GPUs and DPUs to build hyperconverged edge data centers.