Jetson Nano 2GB Among Big Announcements at NVIDIA’s Virtual Conference

NVIDIA kicked off its 2020 virtual GPU Technology Conference with several decisive steps towards the vision of augmented intelligence, taking its place alongside humans in every part of our lives.

The company’s flagship event began with a visual representation of that very idea – founder Jensen Huang, greeting attendees virtually from his kitchen to talk about the next stage of our relationship with and to machines and virtual intelligence.

See also: NVIDIA Makes Available Free Toolkit to Aid COVID-19 Research

It’s poetic. The conference will take place online this year due to pandemic restraints, but advancements never stop, even for global disruption. Some of NVIDIA’s most exciting announcements include:

• Omniverse Beta: An accessible, open-source virtual world designed for collaboration, training, and research for those working in fields as diverse as robotics, entertainment, and architecture. It’s unique in that people populate this diverse field and artificial intelligence itself, working to build and learn alongside human intelligence.

• Clara Discovery and the Cambridge 1 Super Computer: Clara Discovery’s suite of medical tools are built to accelerate drug discovery and negate Eroom’s Law. Underpinning this announcement is the Cambridge 1 supercomputer’s addition – the fastest in the UK and top 30 in the world – to support research.

• EGX AI Platform: Facilitating edge AI server deployment, this is NVIDIA’s most significant step into the world of edge computing, IoT, and augmented intelligence. There will soon be no facet of life that AI won’t appear, with predicted trillions of connected devices. It turns any OEM server into an accelerated, secure AI server.

• NGC: The heart of NVIDIA’s Edge AI platform, this open-source catalog is built to reduce AI deployment challenges across industries. It contains industry-specific AI toolkits and pre-trained models with discoverable systems in a variety of platforms. Enterprises will have building blocks for deploying AI at scale with the full support of NVIDIA’s vast catalog.

• Data Processing Unit and Data Center Infrastructure-on-a-Chip Architecture (DOCA): DPU is a new type of processor explicitly designed to ease data center processing. The Blue Field DPU 2 is a data center infrastructure on a chip, bringing security, processing, recognition, and scale. Alongside, NVIDIA also announces the open-source DOCA, allowing developers to write new applications in tandem. It’s fully compatible and integrates with all third-party systems and a partnership with VMWare to expand further.

Other announcements concentrated on NVIDIA’s commitment to bringing AI into every step of its operations, including systems such as Clara, Rapids, Maxine, and Merlin. Plus, NVIDIA announced quite a few partnerships with major players in the data science and artificial intelligence fields – Cloudera, VMWare, and GSK.

The Jetson Nano 2GB – Democratizing Robotics Development

One of the most exciting announcements is a direct outgrowth of NVIDIA’s commitment to the democratization of development and research, the Jetson Nano 2GB. It’s an entry-level single board computer designed to bring robotics development into the hands of students and makers everywhere.

At just $59, it runs on NVIDIA’s Jetson AI-at-the-Edge Platform and brings NVIDIA into direct competition with the Raspberry Pi 4. It’s one architecture, cloud-native, and all frameworks compatible.

In conjunction, NVIDIA will also offer free training in AI to supplement open-source projects and research built through the Jetson Community. Together, these are scalable through NVIDIA Jetpack SDK.

In total, NVIDIA is releasing 80 new and updated SDKs for a total of 110. NVIDIA is committing to creating an AI-driven world for all companies, enterprises, developers, and consumers.

Huang says it best: “The Age of AI is in full throttle.”