By Peter Cohen

Oracle and Nvidia announced Tuesday a new partnership that promises to drive accelerated computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle is bringing more Nvidia hardware to OCI and Nvidia’s AI Enterprise platform will be available on OCI instances, the companies said, adding that the development is part of a new multi-year partnership signed between the two businesses.

“Combined with OCI’s AI cloud infrastructure of bare metal, cluster networking, and storage, this provides enterprises a broad, easily accessible portfolio of options for AI training and deep learning inference at scale,” Oracle and Nvidia said.

Oracle CEO Safra Catz said in a statement that the expanded alliance with Nvidia will help Oracle deliver new solutions in industries ranging from healthcare to manufacturing, telecommunications to financial services. Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO and founder, underscored his now-familiar mantra that AI and accelerated computing are the future of business.

“Enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud-first AI strategies that enable fast development and scalable deployment. Our partnership with Oracle will put NVIDIA AI within easy reach for thousands of companies,” Huang said.

Nvidia AI Enterprise is the operating system for Nvidia’s AI platform. The companies announced that Nvidia AI Enterprise will soon be available on OCI instances. With this, OCI customers will be able to implement and manage AI workflows including model training, simulation and large-scale deployment.

“NVIDIA AI enables organizations to develop predictive models to automate business processes and gain rapid business insights with applications such as conversational AI, recommender systems, computer vision and more,” they said.

The need for data processing acceleration is driving Oracle’s early access release to Nvidia Rapids acceleration for Apache Spark data processing on OCI Data Flow. OCI Data Flow is a fully managed service offered by Oracle which helps customers using Apache Spark, the open-source analytics engine. Nvidia aims Rapids at customers working on data science workflows; the company says that it can accelerate data science pipelines by 50x using GPU-driven compute and parallelized data loading for faster data manipulation and machine learning. Oracle promises Data Flow users with easy cluster management, simplified capacity planning, and lower costs driven by scalable on-demand access.

“To support this demand, OCI Data Science plans to offer support for OCI bare-metal shapes, including BM.GPU4.8 with NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, across managed notebook sessions, jobs, and model deployment,” said the companies.

What’s more, Oracle and Nvidia announced that they are collaborating to bring AI-accelerated offerings for healthcare, both through Cerner, Oracle’s recently acquired Electronic Health Records (EHR) service, and using Clara, a healthcare-specific AI and High-Performance Computing (HPC) application framework developed by Nvidia.

Oracle recently announced Network Analytics Suite, a new portfolio of cloud-native network analytics solutions created to help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) gain insights around the performance and stability of their 5G network core. The new suite of solutions combines machine learning and artificial intelligence to help network operators more quickly identify and rectify network anomalies that can cause catastrophic failures, according to the company. OC-NWDAF, as Oracle is calling it, is built to be cloud-native, said Oracle, aligning with Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) principles, and supporting 3GPP standards, including use cases identified in 3GPP Release 16 and Release 17.