Last August, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared that AI is “the single most powerful force of our time.” And this sentiment echoes across the leadership of the multi-billion dollar technology company.

This week’s Leading with AI features Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director of NVIDIA South Asia. Dhupar, who has previously held prominent positions in Symantec, Autodesk, Sun Microsystems among others, leads the company’s business operations that include sales, marketing, operations and channels for India and South Asia. An ardent and passionate advocate of technology, Dhupar believes NVIDIA’s journey from its inception in 1993 has been one marked by ‘constant reinvention’. From dominating the PC gaming market to parallel computing and now AI, NVIDIA has retained its fundamental spirit of solving tough and important challenges with technology, by being a ‘learning machine’.

HPC, AI and Compute Intersect For Unparalleled Innovation

Microprocessor performance in the last three decades grew at 50% per year, but CPU performance comes with limitations. With the skyrocketing demand for smart, data-driven products, computing speeds have to be way more, believes Dhupar. And this can be done by facilitating an ecosystem to allow high speed computing to thrive. NVIDIA is playing a key role in making this happen by developing the most cutting edge data centers, GPU architecture and high speed computing such as Ampere, Volta and Pascal. “Innovation takes place at this intersection of High Performance Computing, graphics and Artificial Intelligence. We are building the foremost suite of products that aid vast amounts of parallel, high speed computing.”

At the company’s flagship event GTC (which was digitally hosted in May 2020), among other major announcements CEO Huang announced NVIDIA A100 – the first GPU built on NVIDIA Ampere and capable of delivering 20x the performance of its predecessors, provides data analytics, computing and graphics - which is already being used by 18 service providers including Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, HP and Oracle. Dhupar adds, “This brings the datacenter to the edge. Ampere is now a singular architecture that unifies primary workloads of Machine Learning seamlessly. It can manage situations where humungous computational power is required.”

Other high compute AI offerings include Jarvis – the application framework for multi modal conversational AI services for real time performance of GPUs and Merlin, for building high performance, deep learning- based recommender systems.

The AI Goal for India: A 360-Degree Approach to Foster Collaboration

India offers huge potential for the vast, growing suite of products and solutions being offered by NVIDIA. The datasets across demographies and geographies offers NVIDIA’s robust systems a thriving opportunity to flex their capabilities, believes Dhupar. “For India to fully realise her AI potential, a strong computing infrastructure has to be built. This is imperative for solving problems at scale in areas like healthcare, education and governance. The work we do at NVIDIA is to help build robust data structures for Bharat.”

NVIDIA is extensively engaged with India’s policy makers, government organisations, research & academia, in addition to fostering key relationships with technology stakeholders and startups. A comprehensive, 360-degree approach is needed to foster collaboration, believes Dhupar.

To this effect, the company has struck partnerships with a range of key industry leaders and organisations. A core focus for NVIDIA is research. In July 2020, NVIDIA and IIT Hyderabad entered a partnership to set up India’s first AI Technology Center to accelerate research on AI and its commercial adoption. A similar partnership was struck with IIT Jodhpur to launch the Center for Next Generation AI Research (AINEXT), with the aim of pioneering research and develop next generation AI systems for healthcare, agriculture and public infrastructure among others.

In September 2018, NVIDIA along with Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), IISER Pune and OpenACC, under the purview of the National Supercomputing Mission announced a one of a kind GPU Application Hackathon, intended to foster a community of developers using hybrid CPU-GPU systems to solve challenges at scale, and enhancing the awareness for high performance computing in India. With developers being at the core of their innovation agenda, NVIDIA fosters a global community of developers to encourage developers to brainstorm and work on the latest GPU technologies.

Closely following on the heels of a global developer programme is the renowned startup programme called Inception. Globally, NVIDIA tracks more than 4,500 AI startups while in India, the programme supports more than 350 AI startups especially in the fields of video analytics, healthcare and retail.

COVID19: Learnings & More

Like most companies, NVIDIA was quick to mobilise its capabilities to address the pandemic and the immediate needs of healthcare workers and researchers. NVIDIA made Parabricks available for 90 days to medical researchers in March. Parabricks is based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit and uses GPUs to accelerate sequence data by as much as 50 times. In addition, a task force of computer scientists from the company joined the COVID19 HPC Consortium, comprising US government officials, industry and academia to accelerate research for disease control and management using HPC.

Back home, in association with the CDAC, under Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), NVIDIA and OpenACC, the SAMHAR-COVID19 Hackathon was organized to help researchers combat ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and help the scientific community predict future outbreaks. Through C-DAC’s program, supercomputing using AI, and healthcare analytics-based research for combating COVID-19, researchers can get resources to find solutions for identifying, tracking and predicting outbreaks. The work has the potential to accelerate workflows for drug discovery and drug repurposing.

As the COVID19 healthcare crisis continue to spiral across the world, Dhupar believes this is a definitive time in modern history. “The ongoing pandemic has taught us that we need to be prepared for any eventuality. Unlike any other time in history where a similar event occurred, we have the power of technology on our side now. This is the right time to augment our engineers and builders with the right capabilities, infrastructure to innovate for a new, unprecedented future. We have the talent, opportunities, a tech-conducive government and infrastructure. These tools will help us anticipate threats and not allow us to fall prey to unknown forces.”