Nvidia Corp.’s previously announced Base Command Platform is now being offered to enterprises that need to develop artificial intelligence models using the most powerful supercomputing resources available.

Nvidia Base Command was first seen at Computex 2021 in June. It’s a comprehensive service designed for AI teams that need far greater resources than a few cloud or on-premises servers can provide. It can be thought of as an AI supercomputer in the cloud that’s meant for “large scale, multiuser and multiteam AI development workflows” and enables dozens of researchers and data scientists to tap into accelerated computing resources at the same time.

With the Base Command Platform, customers will be able to access Nvidia’s powerful DGX SuperPod computers hosted in data centers provided by Equinix Inc. NetApp Inc. is involved too, providing high-performance storage resources to meet the enormous performance requirements of accelerated AI computing.

Weights and Biases Inc., which provides specialized machine learning developer tools, is another partner, offering machine learning operations software for Base Command Platform that enables experiment tracking, data versioning and model visualization. Users will also be able to access Nvidia’s own suite of AI and data science software tools, including its NGCTM catalog and application programming interface for integrating with MLOps, Jupyter notebooks and more.

The platform is designed for easy onboarding and provides an overview of all of a company’s AI projects through its cloud-based user interface. There’s also a command-line API and integrated monitoring and reporting dashboards.

Nvidia Base Command Platform is said to be ideal for enterprises that want to move their AI projects from prototyping to production in the fastest possible time, without the costs and complexity introduced with data gravity.

“Base Command Platform makes it easy for enterprises to instantly access the power of an Nvidia DGX SuperPOD to accelerate the AI and data science development lifecycle,” said Nvidia’s Enterprise Computing chief Manuvir Das.

The service itself could be considered somewhat costly though, with Nvidia saying subscription pricing starts at $90,000 per month for a minimum of three months.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE it’s good to see the launch of Nvidia Base Command Platform as there is a need among enterprises for tightly powerful AI processing capabilities coupled with controlled data management to fuel a growing breed of next-generation applications. “Nvidia, NetApp, Equinix and Weights and Biases come together to provide an attractive alternative for AI apps that have traditionally run in the cloud.”

Early adopter Adobe Inc. seems to agree. The company has been using Base Command Platform for several weeks to explore how its researchers and data scientists can work together to develop new AI-powered features and applications.

Adobe Chief Technology Officer and Chief Product Officer Abhay Parasnis said one advantage is the easy onboarding experience. “Our team is exploring the potential of Base Command Platform to simplify the machine learning development workflow,” he added.

Nvidia Base Command Platform is available now for North American customers as a cloud service hosted in Equinix data centers. Later this year, it will be made available in Google Cloud too.

Image: Nvidia