H2O World 2018 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) and H2O.ai today announced a strategic global partnership focused on combining IBM POWER Systems and H2O Driverless AI to address the AI demands of the enterprise. This joint solution is ideal for financial services, retail, manufacturing, IoT and healthcare industries.

H2O.ai has selected IBM POWER Systems as a strategic partner for Driverless AI because of their leading-edge capabilities designed specifically for AI workloads. By partnering with H2O.ai, IBM further expands its ecosystem for enabling businesses to harness AI for competitive gain.

Through the multi-year agreement, IBM and H2O.ai customers can now:

• Use Driverless AI on IBM POWER Systems to accelerate machine learning insights by up to 5X on IBM POWER9 processor-based Power Systems
• Deploy the joint solution to leverage GPU-accelerated machine learning on IBM POWER Systems to gain insights and transform their business
• Take advantage of IBM’s easy on-ramp deep learning toolkit, PowerAI, with H2O Driverless AI’s automated machine learning capabilities

“H2O.ai is a leader in the 2018 Gartner Machine Learning and Data Science Platforms and has built a strong ecosystem and reputation amongst enterprise customers for our innovations in AI and commitment to the open source AI community,” said Sri Ambati, CEO and founder of H2O.ai. “H2O’s Driverless AI on IBM POWER9 GPU-accelerated Systems brings the best of breed innovation in AI to customers.”

“IBM is the leader in AI for business and we are building an ecosystem of partnerships, like this one with H2O.ai, to constantly advance our position in the market,” said Sumit Gupta, VP of AI, Machine Learning and HPC at IBM Cognitive Systems. “As part of this ecosystem strategy, the powerful combination of IBM POWER Systems and H2O.ai’s Driverless AI give enterprises increased ability to apply machine learning to generate extensive value and competitive advantage from their troves of proprietary data.”

Today’s announcement builds on work IBM and H2O.ai have conducted with H2O.ai to integrate H2O open source libraries into IBM’s Data Science Experience analytics solution. Currently, customers can access the open source H2O Python modules, R Modules and H2O Flow, the notebook-style user interface to H2O, from within the Data Science Experience, for greater choice and flexibility.

IBM Advances AI with Power Systems

Built specifically for compute-intensive AI workloads, the new POWER9 systems are capable of improving the training times of deep learning frameworks by nearly 4x allowing enterprises to build more accurate AI applications, faster. The new POWER9-based AC922 Power Systems are the first to embed PCI-Express 4.0, next-generation NVIDIA NVLink and OpenCAPI, which combined can accelerate data movement, calculated at 9.5x faster than PCI-E 3.0 based x86 systems. IBM POWER9 is the best processor for cognitive/AI workloads.

H2O.ai Automates AI with Driverless AI

H2O Driverless AI empowers data scientists or data analysts to work on projects faster and more efficiently by using automation and state-of-the-art computing power to accomplish tasks that can take humans months in just minutes or hours. By delivering automatic feature engineering, model validation, model tuning, model selection and deployment, machine learning interpretability, time-series and automatic pipeline generation for model scoring, H2O Driverless AI provides companies with a data science platform that addresses the needs of a variety of use cases for every enterprise in every industry.