HPE Buys AI Startup Determined AI To Boost HPC, ML

“Determined AI’s unique open-source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure,” said HPE’s Justin Hotard.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise will have some huge news to discuss during HPE Virtual Discover 2021 this week with the unveiling today of its acquisition of artificial intelligence startup Determined AI.

HPE will leverage the San Francisco-based startup’s software stack to train AI models faster and at any scale using Determined AI’s open source machine learning platform. HPE is combining Determined AI’s platform with its own AI and high performance computing (HPC) offerings to improve engineers’ speed-to-production time for AI in order solve business outcomes quicker for customers.

“Determined AI’s unique open-source platform allows ML engineers to build models faster and deliver business value sooner without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure,” said HPE’s Justin Hotard, senior vice president and general manager of HPC and Mission Critical Solutions, in a statement. “As we enter the Age of Insight, our customers recognize the need to add machine learning to deliver better and faster answers from their data. AI-powered technologies will play an increasingly critical role in turning data into readily available, actionable information to fuel this new era.”

[Related: Nutanix CCO: VMware ‘Makes Us Better, Not Bitter;’ HPE Partnership Hits ‘Warp Speed’]

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Today marks HPE’s first acquisition since 2019 when it purchased the business assets of MapR Technologies.

Founded in 2017, Determined AI launched its open-source platform in 2020. The company has quickly emerged as a important player in the evolving machine learning software ecosystem. Its solution has been adopted by customers across industries such as biopharmaceuticals, autonomous vehicles, defense contracting, and manufacturing. HPE and Determined AI plan to provider faster and more accurate insights from their data for customers.

“Over the last several years, building AI applications has become extremely compute, data, and communication intensive. By combining with HPE’s industry-leading HPC and AI solutions, we can accelerate our mission to build cutting edge AI applications and significantly expand our customer reach,” said Determined AI CEO Evan Sparks in a statement.

HPE said Determined AI’s open-source machine learning training platform helps researchers and scientists focus on innovation and accelerate their time to delivery by removing the complexity and cost associated with machine learning 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.

Additionally, Determined AI also makes it easier and faster for users to train their models through a range of capabilities that significantly speed up training. These capabilities include accelerator scheduling, fault tolerance, high speed parallel and distributed training of models, advanced hyperparameter optimization and neural architecture search, reproducible collaboration and metrics tracking, HPE said.

One of HPE’s big goals with the startup is to leverage AI training to fuel projects and innovation with intelligence, and at scale, which requires specialized computing. The computing power of HPC is also increasingly being used to train and optimize AI models, in addition to combining with AI to augment workloads such as modeling and simulation, which are well-established tools to speed time-to-discovery.

To tackle the growing complexity of AI with faster time-to-market, HPE is delivering advanced HPC solutions to train machine learning models and optimize applications for any AI need. By combining Determined AI’s open-source capabilities, HPE is furthering its mission in making AI heterogeneous and empowering ML engineers to build AI models at a greater scale.

Through its HPE GreenLake cloud services for HPC, HPE is looking to make HPC and AI solutions even more accessible and affordable with fully managed services that can run in a customer’s data center, in a colocation or at the edge using the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform.

The Determined AI team will join HPE’s High Performance Computing (HPC) & Mission Critical Solutions (MCS) business group. “I am pleased to welcome the world-class Determined AI team, who share our vision to make AI more accessible for our customers and users, into the HPE family,” said HPE’s Hotard.

HPE Discover 2021 runs from June 22 to June 24.