Lenovo says AI crucial for enterprise as it announces new tech for training machine-learning systems

Video: Can machine learning bail enterprises out of their data management woes?

Lenovo has announced new hardware and software for firms building machine-learning systems, as the Chinese tech giant double down on AI.

Lenovo expects firms will increasingly rely on AI systems to make rapid decisions based on the vast amount of data being generated, predicting will be 44 trillion gigabytes of data will exist by 2020.

To serve the fast-growing market, Lenovo today announced new hardware and software for streamlining machine-learning on high-performance computer systems.

The ThinkSystem SD530, a two-socket server in a 0.5U rack form factor, is now available with the latest NVIDIA GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Scalable family CPUs. By including the option of adding NVIDIA's Tesla V100 GPU accelerator, Lenovo is giving businesses the ability to massively boost the performance of AI-related tasks. Offering more than 100 teraflops of performance, the NVIDIA accelerator greatly reduces the time it takes to train machine-learning models, as well as how long it takes for these models to draw conclusions from data.

To help manage and develop machine-learning models, Lenovo is also releasing a management suite, the Lenovo Intelligent Computing Orchestrator (LiCO). The suite supports the most popular open-source AI frameworks, monitors neural network training and can schedule AI workloads in multi-project environments.

"Artificial intelligence is already having a profound impact on traditional business strategies and scientific research, and most senior leaders consider it a priority for the year ahead," said Kirk Skaugen, president of Lenovo Data Center Group. The announcement was made at the Supercomputing 2017 conference today.

Lenovo has made a $1.2bn investment in AI R&D, with Lenovo's Data Center Group operating three new AI innovation centers in Morrisville, North Carolina; Stuttgart, Germany and Beijing, China. Lenovo says more than 100 Lenovo data scientists and specialized AI developers are focused on helping customers research how AI could solve business and humanitarian challenges, such as analyzing patient scans to spot tumors.

Lenovo is also partnering with researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) to develop AI-driven systems to monitor crop health, and with University College London to develop AI models for deriving more detailed information from collisions inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

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