Bitfusion Flex:
Catapulting Deep Learning Discoveries
As an active angel investor and advisor, I derive huge energy from the startup journey. I take great pride when my portfolio companies break technology barriers and launch products and/or partnerships that truly move the needle for customers. In the end, IMPACT is what matters. And wow, Bitfusion is on that road. Today, May 2nd, two years from the day I invested in the angel round, the company announces Series A financing with major institutional support and launches Bitfusion Flex in beta.
I met the founders, Subbu Rama, Mazhar Memon, and Maciej Bajkowski in the spring of 2015 during the Techstars Cloud program. At that time, they were three hyper-focused engineers with Dell, Intel, and Samsung backgrounds inspired by the computational speed and scale possibilities of co-processors like GPUs and FPGAs. With their software expertise, the team created a virtualization software to enable easy access of GPUs and FPGAs to any organization. The result is faster processing for speed junkies and/or lower costs since fewer servers are needed to run processes. Today, this team has grown to thirteen engineers, data scientists, and business folks all inspired by this same vision and sense of purpose.
Bitfusion Flex is the result of extensive customer trust, engagement, and feedback. In 2016, Bitfusion launched their first AMI (Amazon Machine Image) targeting AI (artificial intelligence)/Deep learning as a major use case of their virtualization technology, to enable developers on AWS to develop deep learning applications on GPUs quicker and more economically; and within a very short time, Bitfusion became the most popular of all Amazon AMIs for Deep Learning! During this awesome adoption cycle, Bitfusion learned that data scientists and AI developers have severe challenges with workload automation, scale, speed, and efficiency in their current workflow. Even more, they could hugely benefit from the flexibility and hardware simplification of the compute virtualization engine Bitfusion developed. Customers demanded a new paradigm, which brings us to today!
Bitfusion proudly partners with IBM for today’s launch. Bitfusion Flex can be used in the IBM Cloud with the newest and most powerful NVIDIA P100 GPUs. Given that nearly every one of the Fortune 1000 has an AI strategy and the fact that Bitfusion Flex lowers the cost of AI application development, today’s announcement catapults the Deep Learning industry into the future. In short time, widespread adoption of Bitfusion Flex will decrease the time to important discoveries in fields ranging from drug discovery to alternative energy.
Bitfusion Flex seamlessly incorporates all the software a data scientist needs to easily manage and scale a project on AI infrastructure. Flex is based on the company’s proprietary compute virtualization engine, which makes it more efficient to leverage and manage compute architectures like GPUs. The solution is scalable, enabling a data scientist to grow resources as needed, and flexible, allowing the deployment on a laptop, in the cloud, or even on premise for large enterprises.
Bitfusion Flex is available in Beta today on Bitfusion.io as a hosted sandbox or as an enterprise software solution. Bitfusion Flex can be deployed to any cloud or data center. Additional technical info is available via this whitepaper. Please plan to visit with Bitfusion at NVIDIA GTC May 8–11 Booth #103.
When energy, passion, and knowledge come together to tackle Deep Learning, the solution is real and powerful. Try it for yourself, Bitfusion Flex is here and ready to make an IMPACT.
