Oct. 22, 2019 — NVIDIA with Microsoft Corp. today announced a technology collaboration focused on intelligent edge computing, designed to help industries better manage and gain insights from the growing flood of data created by retail stores, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, connected buildings, urban infrastructure and other environments.

By enabling closer integration between Microsoft Azure and the NVIDIA EGX platform, the companies are working together to advance edge-to-cloud AI computing capabilities, benefiting businesses worldwide.

The NVIDIA Metropolis video analytics application framework, which runs on EGX, has been optimized to work with Microsoft’s Azure IoT Edge, Azure Machine Learning solutions and a new form factor of the Azure Data Box Edge appliance powered by NVIDIA T4 GPUs. Additionally, NVIDIA-certified off-the-shelf servers — optimized to run Azure IoT Edge and ML services — are now available from more than a dozen leading OEMs, including Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo.

“The age of intelligent edge computing has arrived. The world’s largest industries want to have AI computing at the edge, to extract insight from continuous streams of data, and to sense, reason and act at the point of action,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “In time, this will be the largest-scale computing ever created, connecting trillions of smart sensors. NVIDIA’s and Microsoft’s platforms dovetail to offer customers an end-to-end solution from edge to cloud.”

“In a world where computing is becoming embedded in every place and every thing, organizations require a distributed computing fabric that spans the cloud and edge,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “Together with NVIDIA, we’re bringing the power of Azure and Azure AI to the edge, enabling breakthrough experiences for our customers.”

NVIDIA EGX is a scalable platform that brings AI computing capabilities to the edge, starting with a tiny Jetson Nano and scaling to a rack of T4 servers. It is supported by a complete software stack with CUDA-X libraries, containers, Kubernetes, and cloud solutions such as Azure IoT.

The NVIDIA Metropolis framework includes the NVIDIA DeepStream software developer kit, which has been adopted by 100+ intelligent video analytics software providers. Among these are AnyVision, DeepVision, IronYun, Malong and RealNetworks, which are providing solutions for retail, manufacturing and smart cities.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning solutions allow businesses to rapidly build AI models at scale, from the cloud to the edge. The Microsoft Azure IoT platform enables applications to run from any NVIDIA-certified server or appliance, and on OEM devices that provide connectivity, scalability and maintainability from the cloud. Azure Data Box Edge is an AI-enabled edge computing appliance that processes and analyzes data at the edge and transfers data to cloud when connected.

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In May, Microsoft released the Robot Operating System for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise. In the same month, the tech giant also introduced IoT Plug and Play as part of its new intelligent edge offerings. More recently, a cross-Azure IoT collaboration with IoT Messaging was unveiled to simplify location and spatial intelligence usage.

Today, during a keynote at CEATEC Japan, Microsoft’s Partner Director of Program Management for Intelligent Edge Operating Systems Ian LeGrow explained the firm’s plans regarding the Windows for IoT environment. Essentially, LeGrow unveiled new offerings for customers, including a new solution from Smart Tower, Windows ML container, SQL Server IoT 2019, along with more intelligent edge capabilities and hardware options.

As far as hardware is concerned, general availability has been announced for Windows 10 IoT Core Board Support Packages (BSP) for the NXP i.MX family of processors. These include the i.MX6, i.MX7, i.MX 8M and i.MX 8M Mini application processor families. Through this move, Microsoft is aiming to provide a wider variety of industrial-grade silicon choices for IoT project engineers which enable them to better utilize the Azure IoT platform.

Furthermore, the aforementioned new solution from Smart Tower combines the power of Windows 10 IoT Core, NXP, and Azure IOT. Choosing the Windows IoT platform for this helped Microsoft reduce development costs and marketing time. Essentially, the solution focuses on the improvement of reliability for public infrastructure such as cell towers, offering advantages such as reduction in downtime. The Azure IOT Hub has also been leveraged for better management and connection of devices across the whole network.

Moving on, LeGrow also highlighted support for Azure IoT Edge on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise and Windows Server IoT 2019, something which was announced earlier this year. Through seamless integration with IoT Edge runtime, advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can be moved to edge devices from the cloud.

With regards to machine learning, the new Windows ML container is now also available as an insider preview. Arriving at an on-disk size of a mere 350 MB, the GPU-enabled inferencing container is aimed at providing businesses an efficient platform to develop enterprise-grade IoT solutions. The new container is designed to address AI-inferencing workloads built using the Windows ML API.

And finally, Microsoft has unveiled SQL Server IoT 2019, dubbed the “binary equivalent to SQL Server 2019”. It will be licensed through the OEM channel, and combine with Windows Server IoT 2019 to offer a database platform that focuses on mission-critical data analytics. Although an exact date for its release has not been specified, it will still be available in some capacity before the end of the year.

With the flurry of announcements made at CEATEC today, it certainly looks like Microsoft is granting plenty of attention towards the future of Windows for IoT. If you’re attending the event this week, you can visit Microsoft’s A012 booth to check out the aforementioned solutions firsthand.

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