HPE Discover 2021: HPE is boosting its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with the acquisition of Determined AI.

The San Francisco-based startup’s software can train AI models at scale, using its open source machine learning (ML) platform.

HPE says it will combine Determined AI’s software with its own AI and high-performance computing (HPC) offerings. As a result, it says, ML engineers will be able to easily implement and train machine learning models. This will provide “faster and more accurate insights from their data in almost every industry.”

Determined AI was founded in 2017 and launched its open-source platform in 2020. Since then, it has been adopted by customers across a range of industries, such as biopharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles, defense contracting, and manufacturing.

The Determined AI team will join HPE’s High Performance Computing (HPC) & Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) business group.

HPE’s Justin Hotard

Justin Hotard is SVP and general manager of the group. He said customers recognize the need for machine learning to deliver better and faster answers from their data. He added that Determined AI “share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users”.

“AI-powered technologies will play an increasingly critical role in turning data into readily available, actionable information to fuel this new era.”

Hotard added that Determined AI’s open source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner. In addition, they don’t need to worry about the underlying infrastructure.

Expanding Customer Reach

Building and training optimized machine learning models at scale is considered the most demanding and critical stage of ML development. This is because it requires researchers and scientists to face many challenges frequently found in HPC. These include setting up and managing a parallel software ecosystem. They also need infrastructure spanning specialized compute, storage, fabric and accelerators. Additionally, users need to program, schedule and train their models efficiently to maximize the utilization of their highly specialized infrastructure. This can create complexity and slow down productivity.

HPE says Determined AI’s training platform closes this gap to help researchers and scientists to focus on innovation. They can accelerate their time to delivery by removing the complexity and cost associated with ML development. This includes making it easy to set-up, configure, manage and share workstations or AI clusters that run on-premises or in the cloud.

Determined AI CEO Evan Sparks reiterated that the firm shares HPE’s vision, “to realize the potential of AI. Building AI applications has become extremely compute, data, and communication intensive,” he said.

By combining with HPE, he said the firm can build “cutting edge AI applications” and significantly expand its customer reach.