The past 2 years have seen rapid growth in experimentation and ultimately deployment and adoption of AI/ML at the Edge. This has been fueled by dramatic increases in on-device AI processing capability, and equally dramatic reduction in size and power requirements of devices. The Nvidia Jetson Nano with its GPU and CUDA cores, Google Coral Dev Board containing a TPU for Tensorflow acceleration, and even Microcontrollers running TinyML have quickly gained widespread adoption among developers. These devices are cheap, accurate, and readily available, allowing developers to deploy AI/ML workloads to places that were not practical just a short time ago.
This allows developers to re-think their applications, and begin to migrate AI workloads out of the datacenter, which was the only place to run their AI/ML tasks previously, potentially saving money or improving performance my moving processing closer to where it is needed. This also allows for net-new capability, adding computer vision, object detection, pose estimation, etc, in places that previously were not possible.
In order to help prepare developers and allow them to experiment and build their skills, miniNodes is making available some Edge AI inspired Arm Servers, starting with the Nvidia Jetson Nano. These nodes are intended to be used by engineers and teams just getting started on their Edge AI journey, who are testing their applications and deep learning algorithms. Another use for an Edge AI Arm Server is for light-duty AI processing, where it doesn’t make financial sense to rent big AI servers from the likes of AWS or Azure, and instead a smaller device will work just fine. Finally, developers and teams that do AI training that is not time-sensitive, or relatively small, can achieve significant savings by using a hosted Jetson Nano for their model training, instead of local GPU’s or AWS resources.
Whether you are just getting starting and beginning to explore Edge AI, or have been following the trend and already have Edge AI projects underway, a miniNodes hosted Jetson Nano is a great way to gain hosted AI processing capability or reduce AWS and Azure cloud AI costs.