The field of artificial intelligence (AI) presents both challenges and opportunities in the realm of data analytics. As AI continues to advance, organizations are faced with the task of managing complex analytics processes and overcoming the time-consuming nature of obtaining valuable insights. Deborah Leff, Chief Revenue Officer at SQream, highlights the issue of latency in analytics processes, stating that waiting for hours, days, or even weeks for insights can hinder progress. To address these challenges, organizations must find ways to leverage enterprise-level data analytics efficiently.
Overcoming Common Obstacles
William Benton, Principal Product Architect at NVIDIA, explains that despite the significant impact of AI in various fields, analytics methods have not evolved to the same extent. While AI has revolutionized perceptual problems, analytics processes still rely on traditional architectures. Benton emphasizes the need for a paradigm shift in data-driven decision-making and suggests that investing in powerful Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can enhance analytics processes’ speed, efficiency, and capabilities.
Compared to incremental improvements in databases, the combination of CPUs and GPUs offers immense compute capacity for traditional analytics. By optimizing data ingestion, network speed, query performance, and presentation, organizations can significantly reduce the time it takes to complete the entire analytics process.
The Power of GPUs in Data Analytics
Traditionally, unstructured and ungoverned data lakes based on the Hadoop ecosystem have provided alternatives to traditional data warehouses. While they offer flexibility and storage for large amounts of data, these data lakes often require extensive preparation before running models. SQream took advantage of the power and high throughput capabilities of GPUs to accelerate data processes from preparation to insights.
“The power of GPUs allows them to analyze as much data as they want,” says Leff. “You completely unlock that because of GPUs.”
Nvidia’s open-source suite of GPU-accelerated data science and AI libraries, RAPIDS, further boosts performance by enabling organizations to leverage massive parallelism in Python and SQL data science ecosystems. The goal is not just to make individual steps faster but to optimize communication and feedback loops, resulting in sub-second response speeds. This acceleration empowers data scientists to maintain their flow state and enhances decision-making for business leaders organization-wide.
“For me, this is the democratization of acceleration that’s such a game changer,” Leff exclaims. “We need to say, ‘What should I be doing with my business? What decisions should I be making that I couldn’t make before?'”
With CPUs serving as the brain and GPUs as the raw power, organizations can unlock the full potential of their data. Previously complex and time-consuming queries become feasible, propelling organizations to new possibilities. As technologies like SQream democratize access to acceleration, the potential for data analytics transcends previous limitations, empowering businesses to make more informed decisions based on real-time insights.
