Office of the CTO

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence AND Dell

Technologies Overview
Written by John Roese, CTO & President, Chief Technology Office & Cross Product Operations

Summary:

AI is NOT new but compute technology and data advances are making it usable broadly
now: The field of artificial intelligence including machine learning, deep learning and other
variations of AI has existed for over 50 years but recently the availability of huge data sets to
train systems and sufficiently powerful compute capacity to execute the algorithms has made it
possible to exploit AI in an increasing large set of enterprise use cases.

AI is an enabling technology within almost all IT and business processes and systems:
AI is not a new workload or application but rather a new capability within existing and new
systems that allows for a shift of interpretation of data from humans to the underlying IT
infrastructure. This has a significant impact by reducing or eliminating the level of human
involvement in reasoning across data, making business and other decisions and even engaging
with other humans

AI success is dependent on expertise, data, code and hardware innovations: There are
many AI/DL/ML software frameworks ranging from Tenserflow (Google driven) to Caffe. To
exploit these frameworks businesses must have expertise to define their architecture, pick the
AI algorithms and write code to incorporate these frameworks into their workloads AND must
have access to large data sets for training. Finally, AI systems are both data and compute
intensive and require high performance scalable compute and storage to function.

AI is mostly being targeted at core mission critical business processes and functions
and that is very good for Dell Technologies: Unlike early big data efforts which mostly
started in new areas and non-core use cases using “good enough” infrastructure, AI is being
embedded into the core business processes such as patient care, financial trading, customer
care, fleet management etc. This means that the increased compute and storage demands of AI
enhanced systems drive consumption of enterprise class servers, storage, networking, software
etc and expect enterprise grade resiliency, availability, and performance.

AI will drive a new innovation cycle in hardware: AI/ML/DL systems are incredibly compute
and storage intense. To keep up we already see GPU and FPGA acceleration being used to
outperform general purpose CPUs and we have line of sight (and investments in many) to new
custom silicon processing optimized for running high precision, graph processing oriented AI
algorithms. It is estimated that by 2025 60% of AI will run on optimized silicon. This is also good
for Dell Technologies as every one of these optimized processing chips will reside in an
enterprise class server.

The hyper scale cloud providers have deep investment in AI but most AI is better
delivered on premise: AWS, IBM, Google and Microsoft all have large scale investments in
adding AI/ML/DL capabilities to their public cloud offerings. While public clouds are capable of
delivering AI for enterprises, the core criticality, performance, reliability and sensitivity of the
core business processes using AI mean that most production AI is better delivered on dedicated

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private infrastructure. AI deployments will bias to hybrid or private infrastructure when they are
used in core business processes but training is likely to be suitable for both dedicated and
shared public cloud infrastructure.

Some background data:

1. What are these terms: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning,
Deep Neural Networks?

AI is the big domain of using

computers to reason and make
interpretations and conclusions
from data as human beings do.
Machine Learning is AI delivered
via computing, Neural Networks are
a kind of Machine Learning that
behaves similar to the human brain
and Deep Learning is a kind of
method of Neural Networks. In
general, the biggest area of interest
today is leveraging deep learning to
automate the intelligence in
business processes but it is ok to describe the general activity as AI, ML, or DL at a high
level.

2. What are the elements of a Deep Learning or AI systems?

Learning systems operate much as

people learn. By exposing the
systems to large quantities of known
data via learning algorithms, the
system is TRAINED to recognize
patterns or relationships by tuning
various parameters tied to the
specific algorithms used. Once the
system is trained it can use that
model to INFER conclusions when it
is present with new data as it
operates in production. That results
in insights but also allows the system to continue to optimize its model, thus become
more accurate over time.

3. What are the various Machine Learning/Deep Learning frameworks available

today?

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1) There are many (mostly open source ) AI frameworks available today. They all differ in
both how they
operate and what
they are optimized
for. We expect that
many of these will
disappear and new
ones will emerge.
This creates
complexity for
customers as they
need to select a
framework for their
project and it is not
clear always which
one is best. The good news is that almost all of the frameworks are open and they
almost all benefit from hardware acceleration (GPU, FPGA, etc) thus drive demand for
enterprise class products.

2) What server products does Dell EMC have today to enable Machine Learning?

Dell EMC has

servers that can
accelerate both
training and
inferencing elements
of machine learning.
While general
purpose CPUs can
run machine learning
algorithms the
amount of data that
must be processed
usually leads
customers to add
hardware acceleration to their architecture. Today GPU’s provide the best way to
accelerate almost all machine learning systems and the C4130 and R730 represent two
optimized servers for both training and inferencing. Additional products in the portfolio
can also be used for machine learning use cases.

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4. What the role of storage in Machine learning?

Machine learning systems need huge data sets to be properly trained. That data varies
dramatically in structure but almost always includes huge quantities of unstructured data
(video, audio, images, logs etc) that must be aggregated and stored so that it is available
for the training algorithms to use. Additionally, the Machine learning models are very
large (multi gigabyte) and the data being processed in real time tends to also be
extremely high volume and real time. The unstructured portfolio of Isilon and ECS are
optimized for aggregation of PB's or Exabyte’s of unstructured data that will enable
machine learning to become accurate and store results. The All Flash storage systems
such as VMAX AF, XIO, Unity, and SC are optimized to provide high throughput access
both into and out of the inferencing elements of a real time Dell learning system.

5. What are some Innovation areas is focused on the move machine learning
forward?

a. Server Innovation: 14G servers will increase compute capacity and allow to
exploit Intel innovations in acceleration going forward
b. Silicon Investments: Dell Technologies has invested in numerous semiconductor
startups developing new processor models to accelerate machine learning use
cases. These innovations will all reside within enterprise class servers.
c. Stream Processing Storage: ECS is developing optimized unstructured storage
to handle streams of data versus just objects (project Nautilus). Since most
machine learning deals with time sequence streams this optimization will
increase performance and optimize for AI use cases
d. GPU as a service: OCTO is working with GE, Walmart and other key customers
developing new cloud abstraction software to make GPUs, FPGA’s and other
accelerators available as logical pools of capacity versus the model today where
even in public clouds these hardware elements are limited to single user (and
very low utilization) use. This will allow for dramatic improvements in utilization of
high performance hardware in AI use cases. This will also be contributed to
Pivotal Cloud Foundry as a new capability.
e. Pivotal Labs has data scientists and machine learning expertise to help
customers build their AI optimized cloud native applications.
f. Internal use of AI. In R&D, Services, and many other areas we are working with
AI systems to enhance fault prediction, customer care, inventory management
and even assessment of advanced technology data.

***For internal distribution only. Do not share externally***

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