Digital Engineering – August 2019

DigitalEngineering247.com /// August 2019 DE | Technology for Optimal Engineering Design (^31)
The department of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT
is a pre-release user of the NVIDIA Data Science specifica-
tion. “The NVIDIA-powered data science workstation pro-
vides significant capabilities for training deep neural net-
works for robot perception. With it, the MIT FAST Labs’
ability to train drones to see depth and avoid collisions from
a single camera was significantly accelerated because we
could process larger batch sizes,” says Sertac Karaman, an
associate professor in the department.
Workstations meeting the NVIDIA Data Science
specification go through testing and optimization tai-
lored to the needs of data science users. The result is a
local, single-user computer that NVIDIA says replaces
the need for time on more expensive HPC or cloud com-
puting platforms.
“The NVIDIA-powered data science workstation en-
ables our data scientists to run end-to-end data processing
pipelines on large datasets faster than ever,” said Mike Ko-
elemay, chief data scientist at Lockheed Martin Rotary &
Mission Systems. “Leveraging RAPIDS [software libraries]
to push more of the data processing pipeline to the GPU
reduces model development time, which leads to faster de-
ployment and business insights.”
When Money is no Object
“AI is a big market and huge talking point, and it starts on a
workstation,” says Mike Leach, the workstation portfolio man-
ager for AI, AR and VR at Lenovo. By following the NVIDIA
specification, Leach says Lenovo can give users “a certified
solution and the right software tools out of the box.”
“We see a big shift in data scientists,” adds Leach. They
start with “gigabytes of data, a data lake of images [or] financial
data on the left. They want to move to a fully predictive AI on
the right. The journey in-between is seeing the data, iterating
on predictions and accuracy.”
While attending an AI conference recently, Leach observed
“sometimes money is no object.” Data scientists are expensive
employees to bring aboard, but companies “consider them
must-have, and they will provide the right hardware.” As a re-
sult, Leach says, these scientists “can deliver massive cost sav-
ings based on the products they create.”
Recognizing the Software Stack
Dell, HP and Microway are also releasing workstations for
data scientists that incorporate NVIDIA GPUs. Boutique
workstation vendor Velocity Micro is another vendor building
workstations to the NVIDIA Data Science specification and
The NVIDIA Data Science Workstation specication is primarily used by vendors to create
desktop units, but the hardware and software are also available for mobile workstations.
Image courtesy of NVIDIA.
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