Tech It Out: The Six Five’s Diana Blass is inside The Dell AI Factory at Dell Tech World 2024, where AI-innovation has transformed nearly every industry vertical. In this episode, see the solutions powering that change: new PowerEdge servers optimized for cooling, an autonomous mobile robot trained in the Omniverse; and don’t miss Andy, Dell‘s “human-like” AI assistant.
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Transcript:
Diana Blass: Tech it out. I’m inside Dell’s AI factory learning how AI is defining the next industrial revolution. I am getting a look at real-time generative AI, and I’m told this all wasn’t possible six months ago. It calls for an outfit, but for good reason, right?
Tyler Cook: With our Precision 7960 Workstations and NVIDIA graphics cards, we are able to do real time transformation of video feeds.
David Nicholson: Dell is bringing some rationality to this circus that is AI.
Steen Graham: So some people try to pet the robot dog, so that’s always a safety hazard. Safety first.
Diana Blass: Things have gotten weird.
Steen Graham: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Diana Blass: So join me on this AI tour. It’ll be a fun ride. Buckle up. Hey Andie. What’s an AI factory?
Andie: The Dell AI Factory is our comprehensive approach to integrating AI, offering the broadest range of solutions with new infrastructure, partnerships and services.
Diana Blass: Andie is a digital assistant on display here inside Dell Tech World, one of the many AI devices meant to streamline the adoption of the technology in an enterprise’s environment. As you can see, she’s more human-like than other bots we’ve seen before, and that’s important. Here’s why.
Michael Shepherd: There’s a lot of companies out there that are focused on video generation, but you can’t talk to a video, it’s not bidirectional. And it’s why we have tutors and teachers spend one-on-one time with our students and others is because we understand that one-on-one interaction is very important.
Diana Blass: Now, all these demos look to solve some of life’s biggest challenges, but enabling them to function as simply as we just saw isn’t easy. Let’s step behind the curtain and see how Dell is changing that. This is a look at Dell’s PowerEdge Portfolio, servers built with more automation and cooling technology all fit for today’s complex AI workloads. You tell me this is a great way of how Dell is bringing the AI factory to life. Tell me more.
David Johnson: In the design of these particular systems, we can support a number of different components to actually power your AI factory, including a selection of, from our partners, NVIDIA, AMD and Intel all play a big part in being able to deliver the democratization of AI to you, our customers.
Diana Blass: Now you say the big game changer here is the ability to bring power, tremendous power on-prem to power those AI solutions. Tell us more.
David Johnson: So around that. So we have the conversations with our customers. We always want to make sure that we have a holistic conversation that includes the performance that these particular systems can bring when they’re training their models. But we also want to talk about the entire picture where we’re talking about what’s the cooling requirements? How much power do you need? Unfortunately, with the power and performance and the needs for cooling over time, air just probably won’t get it done. We’re going to need some other types of solutions to be able to cool these beasts as they’re actually training those models. And to do that, we’ve introduced a liquid assist cooling that you see here in the middle and direct liquid cooling down there at the end.
Diana Blass: And you don’t have to go far to see the PowerEdge in action.
Steen Graham: We’ve got some exciting stuff we’re going to show you about how you can take a synthetic environment and turn it into real outcomes for humans in the real world. So first, it all starts with a fantastic server here. Right now we’ve got the 760xa we’re running four NVIDIA L40 GPUs that are really, really well suited for building these synthetic worlds. In this case, what we have is we’ve got this industrial facility and we’re using NVIDIA Omniverse to build out this industrial facility. And then we’re using the Isaac simulation environment from NVIDIA as well to take this autonomous mobile robot and train it on this facility.
What everybody really wants to see is after you train something on synthetic data and build custom models that we’ve done here… We actually built a custom model to detect things like chemical spills, well fortunately, we’re not able to do chemical spills live here. So we’ve got simulated chemical spill, and this is the first time this Nova Carter robot, a partnership between Segway and NVIDIA has actually seen this real world example. It’s been trained on synthetic data. And you’ll see up here on the screen, you’ll see it’s, well, it’s detecting its buddy, a robot dog, a safety cone. And once it finds its way around, it will also detect this synthetic chemical spill as well.
Diana Blass: And I bet you didn’t expect to see a farm at a tech show. Check out how Nature Fresh Farms is using VxRail and PowerScale to produce tastier veggies.
Keith Bradley: Yeah, what we’re looking at is we find a sustainable way to grow the peppers, to grow them, and we’re using AI to help us optimize that growth pattern.
Diana Blass: So let’s point out how the technology fits within this structure here. Where are the sensors?
Keith Bradley: Typically, we’d have sensors in the middle here watching for the light coming in, the light from the lights that are showing here now. We’d have a sensor monitoring what the water came out of this tube into the plant, what comes out of the plant in the bottom, the CO2 levels of the system, like what levels of CO2 they’re getting. Everything we monitor so that way we can optimize that light pattern so we know exactly what’s going on. You name it, humidity, everything, we watch it all. We watch the weather patterns.
So how do we look at the weather and it’s going to say it’s going to get colder outside, it’s going to be cloudier in the afternoons. We’ll look at doing more in the morning because the plants don’t usually want to be irrigated, then we’ll turn the lights on to compensate.
Diana Blass: So clearly AI is touching every device within a customer’s IT environment. From the PC to the data center to this guy here. It’s everywhere. So check it out, it’s coming your way very soon.
Author Information
Diana Blass is a journalist with a background in technology news and analysis. Her work has appeared on Fox Television Stations, The Discovery Channel, CRN, Light Reading, and other Informa-owned media brands. In addition to her work at The Six Five, she manages Diana Blass Productions, where she develops and produces digital documentaries, podcasts, and commercials for media and corporate brands.
