WEKA partners with NexGen Cloud to democratise AI
Author: Isha Jain
WEKA has announced that it is partnering with NexGen Cloud, a sustainable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider based in the UK, to provide the high-performance infrastructure foundation underpinning its forthcoming AI Supercloud, as well as the on-demand services offered by Hyperstack, NexGen Cloud’s GPUaaS platform.
Rise of the GPU cloud
The explosion of generative AI in the past year is driving extremely high demand for the powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to fuel AI model training and inference. Obtaining the necessary GPUs these performance-intensive workloads require is becoming increasingly challenging as demand outpaces supply. The advanced GPUs needed to support AI workloads at scale can be expensive and complex to manage, creating an insurmountable barrier for many enterprise organisations looking to adopt and advance their enterprise AI initiatives.
At the same time, demand for public cloud resources is exceeding available resources, leaving many companies without a viable solution for AI initiatives. Innovative vendors like NexGen Cloud are now scaling their considerable resources to support the surge in demand for data infrastructure services that can support large-scale AI model training and inference workloads.
According to S&P Global Market Intelligence, the limited supply and rising cost of GPUs will be key drivers for enterprises to explore and adopt GPU cloud infrastructure for their AI projects. “Full-stack as-a-Service business models for generative AI will gain traction,” says John Abbott, Principal Research Analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. “The ever-rising price of AI-enabled infrastructure is dampening enthusiasm for on-premises deployments, favouring the cloud.”
Powering the next wave of innovation
Built on the latest GPU hardware from NVIDIA, NexGen Cloud’s AI Supercloud service will provide an affordable, on-demand, compute-intensive solution for enterprises, research organisations, and governments innovating at the intersection of cloud and AI. The company selected the WEKA Data Platform to provide the critical software infrastructure required to increase the performance and efficiency of the new accelerated compute service offering.
“When we started building our AI Supercloud solution, we looked at several data platforms and parallel filesystem solutions. The environment’s extreme scale and performance demands quickly removed other vendors from consideration,” says Chris Starkey, Co-Founder and CEO at NexGen Cloud. “The WEKA Data Platform immediately stood out, not only for its exceptional performance and low latency but also for its ability to maximize the efficiency of our GPU cloud with a hardware-agnostic, innovative software solution. It enabled us to leverage existing hardware investments and power all of our cloud services as efficiently and sustainably as possible, which is core to our mission.”
WEKA’s data platform software provides unparalleled performance and scale to efficiently feed data to large-scale GPU environments, turning stagnant data silos into dynamic data pipelines that fuel data-starved GPUs, helping them to run efficiently and up to 20x faster. With WEKA, NexGen Cloud improves the experience for its customer base by enabling huge quantities of data to be accessed and processed faster regardless of file size, letting them focus their efforts on the algorithms instead of managing the underlying data architecture.
