VMware and Nvidia kicked off VMworld 2020 with a new partnership that promises to accelerate enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). The partnership will see the companies tie Nvidia's GPU Cloud (NGC) hub — a repository for AI application frameworks — into VMware's vSphere, Cloud Foundation, and Tanzu platforms.

The integration is designed to be transparent, said Manuvir Das, head of enterprise computing at Nvidia. "For the IT administrator or the operator, it's the same familiar experience. ... They can simply extend their familiar environment into this model of accelerated computing with AI."

The companies claim this integration will eliminate barriers to AI adoption by enabling businesses to extend existing infrastructure to the cause.

"Essentially what we're saying is that AI workloads no longer need any special set up," said Krish Prasad, SVP and GM of cloud platform business at VMware. "The AI workloads can now run on the exact same environment that all the enterprises are used to, which is a virtualized set up based on VMware infrastructure."

Partnering with Nvidia was an opportunity to make AI "one of the most powerful technologies" access to any enterprise, said Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, in a statement.

Gelsinger's sentiments were echoed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang who has long championed the democratization of AI technologies.

“AI and machine learning have quickly expanded from research labs to data centers in companies across virtually every industry and geography,” he said in a statement. “Nvidia and VMware will help customers transform every enterprise data center into an accelerated AI supercomputer."

Among the first organizations to leverage the Nvidia and VMware's combined technologies is the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Intelligent Imaging. The university is already using Nvidia's Clara application framework — available through the NGC hub — for AI-powered imaging and VMware Cloud Foundation to support their workloads.

"AI can be used to detect disease in large patient imaging studies more rapidly than the human eye, and, with further research, this technology will enable doctors to provide the fastest, most accurate and safest diagnoses and treatments for patients," said Christopher Hess, chair of radiology and biomedical imaging at UCSF, in a statement.

Nvidia will also integrate its BlueField-2 data processing unit (DPU) — acquired as part of the $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox — with VMware Cloud Foundation through a "technical demonstration" dubbed Project Monterey.

VMware Cloud Foundation is a hybrid cloud platform designed to manage virtual machine sand orchestrate containers using the company's full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure. Nvidia aims to secure and accelerate workloads by taking advantage of its SmartNIC technologies.

According to Huang, the use of Nvidia DPUs and VMware's Cloud Foundation allows companies to build and secure, programable software-defined data centers capable of accelerating any workload.