AWS advances machine learning with new chip, elastic inference
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The launch of Amazon Elastic Inference lets customers add GPU acceleration to any EC2 instance for faster inference at 75 percent savings. Typically, the average utilization of GPUs during inference is 10 to 30 percent, Jassy said.
With a growing number of enterprises embracing machine learning on the cloud, Amazon Web Services is introducing new capabilities and tools to improve inference. Specifically, it's launching Amazon Elastic Inference and unveiling a new processor called AWS Inferentia.
"If you think about the cost equation... the vast majority of cost - probably about 90 percent of it - is in inference," AWS CEO Andy Jassy said at the re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.
With Elastic Inference, you can take any EC2 instance and provision elastic inference right at the time you are creating that instance. You can start at 1 teraflop, or do up to 32 teraflops. Elastic Inference can detect when there's one of the major frameworks running on that instance determine what would benefit from acceleration.
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AWS re:Invent
"This is a pretty significant game change in being able to run inference much more cost effectively," Jassy said.
Meanwhile, AWS Inferentia is a high-performance machine learning inference chip, custom designed by AWS. It will be very high throughput, low latency, with sustained performance and very cost effective, Jassy said. It will support all the major frameworks and will be available on all EC2 instance types.
Also announced during the keynote was AWS SageMaker Ground Truth, which Jassy said allows organizations to implement machine learning without spending the thousands of human hours on training models.
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The CEO said AWS SageMaker Ground Truth is a highly accurate training dataset that will reduce data labeling costs by 70 percent.
Typically, "you have to label objects to train the model ... you need to know what a stop sign or pedestrian is," he explained. "It requires thousands of hours of footage, and you have to label everything."
This process is generally slow, expensive, and hard to achieve. "Most companies just don't bother and that makes it harder to build these computer vision models," Jassy said.
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Meanwhile, Amazon SageMaker RL makes available new machine learning capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy with reinforced learning. It amounts to "reinforced learning for every developer and data scientist," Jassy said.
"We want to enable everyone to have access to this," he said, noting smaller companies should be able to do what the larger ones do.
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