ASI Solutions has partnered with VAST Data to create a secure and scalable GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS) offering for New Zealand businesses. The service is hosted in data centers certified to run on 100 percent renewable energy and built to the highest-grade international standards for reliability and energy. Lloyd Vickery, ASI Solutions country manager, explained that GPUs excel at training AI models because they can handle numerous operations simultaneously, unlike CPUs, which are optimized for sequential processing.
This parallelism is crucial for AI tasks that require the simultaneous processing of vast amounts of data. Vickery compared using a GPU to having an entire team of librarians, each handling multiple books simultaneously. While the individual librarians (GPU cores) might not be as adept as a single expert (CPU core), their collective effort completes the sorting much faster due to their parallel approach.
ASI’s GPUaaS offers two instances: a medium based on dual Nvidia L40S GPUs and a small instance using a single GPU. The initial service offering targets researchers, universities, the government, and other organizations with data sovereignty requirements.
Securing scalable AI with GPUs
Vickery said that organizations can use cloud-based GPUaaS to make an AI model available to everyone in the company or to their customers. This makes it easier to share information across teams and securely gives the AI access to customer data. The service can also be scaled up and down according to demand.
When asked about the availability of GPUs, Vickery said that ASI is not currently finding any supply chain issues. “It might be hard to buy 10,000 cards, but it’s relatively easy to buy 10 or 100, which is more in line with NZ scales,” he said. Vickery believes that having the ability to run open-source AI models like Llama in the country is important, especially as it gets easier to fine-tune them for specific requirements.
However, he doesn’t see New Zealand’s need to train its models from scratch, as it is costly. It would be Better if we could leverage the investment from these companies spending billions and then build on top of it to create value for New Zealand,” Vickery added.
Photo by Colin Watts on Unsplash
