VMware Inc.’s latest startup acquisition is aimed at making its flagship vSphere virtualization platform better at running artificial intelligence applications.

The Dell Technologies Inc. subsidiary on Thursday announced plans to buy Bitfusion.io Inc., a four-year-old provider of virtualization software for AI infrastructure. The startup’s technology is based on many of the same concepts as vSphere.

Virtualization is a method of making data center equipment more efficient. It enables administrators to treat hardware resources such as storage capacity and processing power as if they were separate from the underlying server, which provides more operational flexibility. That in turn allows infrastructure teams to make big cuts in the amount of hardware resources that sit idle.

Bitfusion sells a software product called FlexDirect for virtualizing the chips companies use to run their AI models. It works with graphics processing unit cards, field-programmable gate arrays and application-specific integrated circuits, the three most popular types of processors employed in machine learning projects. FlexDirect lets companies provision processing power for AI applications in a way that maximizes how much use they get out of their chips. 

“The platform can share GPUs in a virtualized infrastructure, as a pool of network-accessible resources, rather than isolated resources per server,” Krish Prasad, the head of VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit, wrote in the blog post announcing the Bitfusion acquisition.

Prasad detailed that the Dell subsidiary will integrate FlexDirect into vSphere. The goal is to help customers squeeze more horsepower from the AI chips attached to their virtualized servers. FlexDirect also works with cloud-based machine learning infrastructure, which makes it a particularly good fit for VMware’s product strategy.    

“In many ways, Bitfusion offers for hardware acceleration what VMware offered to the compute landscape several years ago,” Prasad wrote. “Bitfusion also aligns well with VMware’s ‘Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device’ vision with its ability to work across AI frameworks, clouds, networks and formats such as virtual machines and containers.”

The startup’s team will come aboard to help with the product integration effort. Prior to the acquisition, Bitfusion had raised over $8 million in funding from investors that included Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Xilinx Inc., a major maker of field-programmable gate arrays. 

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE