VMware has announced its intention to acquire hardware acceleration company Bitfusion. Krish Prasad, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware, revealed the news in a company blog post published last week.
Describing Bitfusion as a “pioneer” with strengths in GPU technology, VMware detailed how this deal will further VMware’s plans to incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into its hardware acceleration strategy.
“Hardware acceleration for applications—which can take the form of GPUs (graphics processor units), FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits)—delivers efficiency and flexibility into the AI space including subsets such as machine learning.”
“Hardware acceleration for applications—which can take the form of GPUs (graphics processor units), FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), and ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits)—delivers efficiency and flexibility into the AI space including subsets such as machine learning,” Prasad explained in a statement. “Unfortunately, hardware accelerators today are deployed with bare-metal practices which force poor utilization, poor efficiencies, and limit organizations from sharing, abstracting and automating the infrastructure.”
Virtualization presents an opportunity to improve how GPU resources are shared among isolated GPU compute workloads, enabling sharing across the network. Hardware accelerators can be used both on-promises and in the cloud. Bitfusion’s software platform has the ability to share GPUs in a virtualized infrastructure, and can also be extended to support other accelerators like FPGAs and ASICs.
VMware believes that Bitfusion, with its versatility and forward-thinking software, is well aligned with the company’s “Any Cloud, Any App, Any Device” vision. VMware plans to integrate Bitfusion into the vSphere platform following the close of the deal.