GTC DC: GPGPU at the edge

31 October 2018
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I was recently in Washington DC to attend a Jetson AGX Xavier meetup event and GTC DC technology conference.

GTC DC is the only GTC to have a strong focus on military and defense applications with the exhibition space full of rugged and defense technologies and, coupled with the great speaker sessions, it’s a very worthwhile event for companies such as Abaco Systems. We even had our ImageFlex vision processing demo running over on the EIZO booth which gained a lot of customer interest.

At the conference, we talked about how we can deploy GPGPU technology at the edge of the military network in ground applications and how AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) will change the way we build our autonomous platforms. Today’s platforms are now fully digital and connected, so the time is right for accelerated computing - from increased situational awareness to autonomous resupply, natural language interfaces, AI-enabled logistics and increased capabilities in our vision systems in ground vehicles, bases and soldier architectures.

Across the landscape

It was great to see so many employees from Lockheed Martin (Diamond sponsor of GTC DC) and Raytheon at the conference. I spoke to many industry insiders about defense applications across the defense landscape, from military cloud applications to deployable edge processing for remote (unconnected GPS denied) platforms such as robotics, drones and resupply platforms.

During the GTC keynote given by Ian Buck (vice president of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA) he spoke about wide-ranging applications from healthcare, data science (he announced cuDF and RAPIDS) and TensorRT and TensorRT Inference server for optimized network deployment on both data center and edge devices.

The most exciting session I attended was a Deepstream developer session. Deepstream is a real-time vision processing SDK that extends the already comprehensive capabilities in Gstreamer. As a seasoned Linux Gstreamer developer, this was very exciting - an extensible framework to allow developers to simply add AI capabilities into their existing applications. If you’re not familiar with Gstreamer, I highly recommend checking it out along with the Deepstream SDK. Version 3 will have full support for Jetson AGX Xavier and will be out by the end of the year.

This was the last GTC this year, but we’ll be back next year with some exciting product announcements at GTC in 2019. We’ll hope to see you there.

Ross Newman

With a degree in software engineering, Ross is a field applications engineer, based in our Towcester office and supporting Abaco customers throughout EMEA. He has worked extensively in the defense industry with companies including BAE Systems and Lockheed Martin. Ross enjoys travel and robotics, and for the last three years has taught coding to young children at a local school as part of a national network of Code Clubs (codeclub.org.uk).