Google and Nvidia Partnership Could Lead to Certification

Here is an interesting and potentially significant bit of news. On June 28, Nvidia announced a partnership with Google Cloud. The two organizations plan to collaborate to develop "the industry's first artificial intelligence (AI)-on-5G Innovation Lab."

There's tantalizing potential here: Nvidia not only makes chipsets, computer graphics processors (that do double-duty as high-end numeric and machine learning platforms), and multimedia software, but also owns technology companies that build standards-based software defined networking and virtualization platforms.

Because these hyperconverged computing platforms are tailored for high-end data centers and web-scale service providers, this is a fascination team-up. Indeed, there's a great deal more potential and promise here than, at first blush, some may suppose.

What the AI Innovation Lab Will Do

According to aforelinked press release, the lab is intended to permit "AI software partners and network infrastructure players to develop, test, and implement solutions that will boost the creation of smart factories, smart cities, and other advanced 5G and IT applications."

As one might expect, it will also permit those partners and players to try out the latest and greatest of Nvidia's GPU-based technologies and networking platforms, along with Google Cloud's Anthos platform. The idea is to create an environment in which researchers and developers can put AI and data to work, so that they can find more and better ways to boost productivity; make their infrastructures safer, more resilient, and more reliable; and juice up their abilities to conduct business.

This work will get underway in the second half of 2021, but there's no word yet when the lab will open its door to third parties interesting in diving in and partaking of its offerings.

Why I Think This Has Certification Potential

The introduction of 5G into this mix brings more hot topics together, along with AI, hyperconverged infrastructures, and cloud-scale computing and big data acquisition and analysis. Edge computing is already turning into a "thing."

5G — which promises to solve the "last mile" of connectivity with speeds as high (or higher) than what non-optical connections can bring to the party — is destined to be an even bigger "thing" in the worlds of communications, networking, computing, and infrastructure.

In short, this lab is going to focus on collections of skills and knowledge that are uniquely valuable and in extremely high demand — as are the tools and technologies that the lab will make available. Am I wrong to think that there will be interesting and valuable training and certification possibilities and opportunities to come out of this nexus as well? I think not.

GCP is already home to a well-developed certification program, with credentials for Cloud Engineers and Architects, Cloud Developers, Data and Machine Learning Engineers, and more. Nvidia already operates an "academy" where they offer a variety of training courses, mostly free, across a broad range of topics that include networking technologies, software and tools, and AI and data science.

I have to think that, for Nvidia, Google's contribution to the partnership will be more than cloud platform smarts and supporting technologies. I can't help but believe the GCP cert program and its many lessons learned and problems solved must also be a value-add to help Nvidia up its training ante, and get into the certification game.

Time will tell. In the meantime, this should be an extremely interesting technology match-up to watch and learn from. Stay tuned: as things develop, I'll keep you posted.