In a compelling keynote at the Databricks Data + AI Summit 2024, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang emphasized the transformative power of accelerated computing in data processing and analytics. Speaking alongside Databricks cofounder and CEO Ali Ghodsi, Huang described business data as a ‘gold mine’ for companies, underscoring the challenges and opportunities in harnessing this valuable resource.
Databricks Leverages NVIDIA’s Full Stack to Accelerate Generative AI Applications
Highlighting a significant development, Huang and Ghodsi announced the integration of NVIDIA’s accelerated computing technology with Databricks Photon, a high-performance data processing engine. This collaboration aims to enhance Databricks SQL’s performance and cost efficiency, leveraging NVIDIA’s capabilities in accelerated computing and generative AI.
“This is a big announcement,” Huang remarked, noting the critical role of accelerated computing and generative AI in today’s technological landscape. “NVIDIA and Databricks are combining our expertise to deliver these advancements to enterprises.”
The integration, which has been five years in the making, involves a set of specialized libraries from NVIDIA to accelerate Photon, enabling faster and more energy-efficient data processing.
“We are excited to partner with NVIDIA to utilize GPU acceleration on the Photon engine,” said Ghodsi. “This will enhance core data processing capabilities and enable them to run on NVIDIA GPUs.”
Creating Generative AI Factories With NVIDIA NIM
Additionally, NVIDIA and Databricks announced that Databricks’ open-source model DBRX is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, accessible via the NVIDIA API catalog. These microservices offer fully optimized, pre-built containers for deployment in various environments, simplifying the integration of generative AI models into applications.
“Creating these endpoints is complicated,” Huang noted. “We have optimized everything into a microservice that runs both on the cloud and on-premises, enhancing developer productivity by standardizing the integration of AI models.”
Launched in March, DBRX leverages Databricks’ comprehensive tools and techniques and is trained using the NVIDIA DGX Cloud platform. Enterprises can customize DBRX with their data to create specific models or use it to develop a mixture of expert models.
Huang emphasized the importance of accelerating data processing and adopting generative AI, urging companies to engage with these rapidly advancing technologies. “Generative AI is growing exponentially — you don’t want to lag behind,” he advised.
Joining the Conversation
Summit attendees were encouraged to participate in sessions and engage with NVIDIA experts to explore the future of AI and data intelligence. Key sessions included:
- “Development and Deployment of Generative AI with NVIDIA” at 12:30 p.m. PT
- “Architecture Analysis for ETL Processing: CPU vs. GPU” at 4:30 p.m. PT
- “Spark RAPIDS ML: GPU Accelerated Distributed ML in Spark Clusters” at 1:30 p.m. PT
For more information, visit the NVIDIA Blog.
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