Voltron Goals to Unblock AI with GPU-Accelerated Knowledge Processing

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Knowledge is on the coronary heart of synthetic intelligence, however it’s additionally rising as considered one of its largest bottlenecks. With out ample portions of excellent, clear knowledge to feed into fashions, corporations merely can’t reap the rewards of AI. This case has been acknowledged by the parents at Voltron Knowledge, which just lately launched a brand new distributed question engine designed to make use of GPUs to crank up the information processing volumes to feed AI demand. Voltron additionally acquired an AI firm final week, furthering its AI goals.

“Firms on the forefront of AI are constrained by knowledge processing,” Voltron Knowledge mentioned in its December 1 press launch asserting Theseus, its new distributed processing engine. “ETL, function engineering, and transformation are key components of AI/ML. They can’t ramp up AI capabilities effectively as a result of they can not afford to construct out large knowledge CPU clusters quick sufficient. The efficiency divergence between GPUs and CPUs is barely rising; this drawback is getting exponentially worse.”

This led the Mountain View, California firm–which was based in late 2021 by Wes McKinney, the creator of pandas and co-creator of Apache Arrow, and Josh Patterson, the previous senior director of RAPIDS at Nvidia–to develop Theseus, which it claims is the primary distributed knowledge engine designed to run on accelerated {hardware}, together with GPUs, in addition to excessive bandwidth reminiscence and accelerated networking and storage.

Theseus is an “embeddable engine” that runs on distributed programs outfitted with it commonplace CPUs, similar to x86 and ARM varieties, in addition to accelerated {hardware} like Nvidia GPUs. Clients can plug into their current knowledge platforms through current requirements, similar to Arrow, RAPICS, Ibis, Substrait, and Velox, and develop apps for Theseus utilizing Python, R, Java, Rust, or C++.

Theseus can course of knowledge alongside different open supply question engines that clients is perhaps utilizing, similar to Apache Spark or Presto. Nevertheless, because of its native assist for GPUs, Theseus runs 45x sooner than Spark, and prices 20x much less, the corporate claims.

The aim is to leverage accelerated compute to crank by means of as a lot knowledge as shortly as attainable, with out requiring costly customized {hardware} or specialised setups. It’s about getting past “The Wall,” Voltron Knowledge co-founder Josh Patterson mentioned.

“AI programs are headed straight for The Wall–an inflection level the place CPU-based large knowledge programs attain peak efficiency and may now not sustain with GPU-powered AI platforms,” Patterson mentioned in a press launch. “We received’t be capable of sustain with AI demand at scale till knowledge processing basically adjustments. Knowledge processing engines should leverage accelerated compute, reminiscence, networking and storage. We’re thrilled to introduce Theseus to the world – an engine that’s constructed to leverage the newest {hardware} improvements and helps corporations recover from The Wall.”

This strategy has its advantages, notes Hyoun Park, chief analyst of Amalgam Insights.

“Within the Period of AI, enterprises face a proliferation of information sources, abstraction of coding languages and strategic wants for each worker to be extra data-driven. On the identical time, Spark has reached its limits as an analytic processing system for the era of Huge Knowledge,” Park says in Voltron’s press launch. “As the common enterprise now accesses over a thousand knowledge sources, companies should make investments their knowledge processing capabilities to assist the following order of magnitude for analytics and AI calls for. Voltron Knowledge has taken an necessary step ahead with this maiden voyage of Theseus to unravel all of those knowledge points for the Period of AI.”

Josh Patterson, co-founder and CEO of Voltron Knowledge (left) talks with Mohan Rajagopalan, VP & GM, HPE Ezmeral Software program (Picture courtesy Voltron Knowledge)

The corporate is promoting entry to Theseus through a non-traditional “income share” mannequin, whereby clients or companions embed the engine into their very own programs. One of many first corporations to take Voltron up on the provide is HPE, which is together with Theseus as a part of its Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software program.

Mohan Rajagopalan, the vice chairman and basic supervisor of HPE Ezmeral Software program, says Theseus will enhance the circulate of information for AI, ML, and analytics workloads.

“With Theseus, Voltron Knowledge’s composable question engine, enterprises can take full benefit of HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software program’s GPU-and-CPU optimized knowledge lakehouse to turbo-charge knowledge preparation, knowledge processing and different historically CPU-based workloads,” Rajagopalan says in a press launch.

Voltron made its personal transfer into AI final week with the acquisition of Claypot, an AI startup creating software program to ship function engineering and MLOps capabilities. The corporate was based in 2022 by Chip Huyen, the creator of the guide “Designing Machine Studying Methods,” and Zhenzhong Xu, who led the streaming knowledge platform crew that serves greater than 2,000 knowledge use circumstances at Netflix.

“I couldn’t be extra excited to deliver on Chip Huyen, Zhenzhong Xu and all the Claypot AI crew,” Patterson says in a press launch. “Collectively we’re going to have the ability to speed up our real-time and MLOps product roadmap with state-of-the-art options for our clients.”

This was Voltron Knowledge’s first acquisition. In February 2022, Voltron acquired $22 million in a seed spherical from BlackRock and Walden Catalyst, adopted by an $88 million Sequence A spherical with Catalyst the identical month.

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