October 14, 2022 - Intel has been partnering with Red Hat* to offer a solution for Red Hat* OpenShift* AI that includes AI Tools from Intel (formerly Intel® AI Analytics Toolkit or AI Kit). With the help of these tools, Red Hat OpenShift AI can perform faster and more efficiently.
The partnership between Intel and Red Hat came in response to the needs of their customers for an enterprise-grade solution for data science. The need for a more efficient and faster solution stems from the rise in demand for data scientists, which is happening at an exponential rate.
The new tools include support for popular frameworks such as TensorFlow*, PyTorch*, and Apache MXNet*, as well as optimized workflows for deploying AI models on Kubernetes* clusters. Red Hat OpenShift AI also provides tight integration with key components of the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor, including Intel® Deep Learning Boost (Intel® DL Boost), which delivers performance that's up to three times better than previous generations for deep learning workloads.
The Need and Solution
Have you ever been in a situation where you were trying to increase the performance of your AI or data science application, but didn't have access to a GPU? Well, think about using one of the great software offerings available in the OpenShift AI-managed software offering: AI Tools from Intel.
OpenShift AI runs on Intel hardware in AWS*. As a result, you get "out of the box" acceleration during two critical stages of machine learning: Model development and training, and the deployment of a model to production.
AI Tools offer easy-to-use accelerations without major code changes. Simply swap out or add to existing packages for the optimized, Intel-supplied version to take advantage of their optimizations.
Take a look at how AI Tools run on OpenShift AI (figure 1).
Figure 1. OpenShift AI runs within AWS on Intel processors
You can see all benchmarks and configurations here.
The left side of figure 1 shows that OpenShift AI is always deployed on Intel hardware, regardless of the node type. Other AWS services, Red Hat or otherwise, might not use Intel exclusively. As a result, developers on OpenShift AI can take full advantage of Intel's optimizations either through AI Tools or the OpenVINO™ toolkit.
On the right side of figure 1, you can see the performance optimizations that users can experience by implementing AI Tools optimizations in their workloads. As you can see, AI Tools benefit the entire data science pipeline, with developers able to see anywhere from up to 100x+ performance gains with Intel® Extension for Scikit-Learn*, or 2.8x faster quantized inference using the Intel® Optimization for TensorFlow* and the Intel® Neural Compressor. Developers can see these great performance gains on Intel® architecture with, at most, a few lines of code changed—that’s it!
Common AI and machine learning opportunities and algorithms can be used across industries and have direct computational benefits from AI Tools. Benefits are outlined in figure 2.
Figure 2. Benefits of AI Tools
Faster and Cheaper
Increasing computational efficiency on deployed models means higher throughput (or more predictions in the same amount of time) and faster turnaround times. These new additions to the OpenShift portfolio make it easier for data scientists and analytics professionals to develop and deploy AI.
By increasing computational performance, you can save operational expenditures by:
- Increasing the density of your compute footprint.
- Iterating on your data science process more quickly because computations finish sooner.
- Solving more problems with efficient computations.
- Increasing the efficient use of expensive resources.
AI Tools from Intel help Red Hat OpenShift AI performance in a number of ways:
- Helping to optimize machine learning workloads on Intel Xeon processors.
- Enabling data scientists to create and deploy powerful analytics models at scale.
- Accelerating data science workflows by up to 10x.
- Generating insights from raw data.
Resources
Interested in trying out AI Tools? You can try it out for free with the Red Hat OpenShift AI sandbox.
For more information on the AI Tools, see:
For more information on the benefits of this Red Hat/Intel partnership, see the joint whitepaper on the subject, or the announcement on the Red Hat blog.