What exactly does an AI-capable infrastructure include?
“In its simplest sense, it is the infrastructure that you need to create your AI and to deploy it,” says Terry Halvorsen, vice president of federal client development at IBM and former Defense Department CIO. “It’s made up of both hardware and software.”
Significant processing power is required.
“You need enough compute to handle the volume of the data that you’re going to process,” Halvorsen says. “Then, you need the right kind of storage environment that allows you to store this data that you’re working on so it can be operated on and then distributed in a way that gets out in mission time.”
Agencies need processors that can handle a vast number of computations quickly. With AI “you need a much higher degree of speed and performance in your infrastructure,” Halvorsen says. “It’s a combination of memory and the speed of your servers. You need enough memory so you don’t bring the system to a stop, and you also need servers capable of processing at mission speed.”
AI-capable infrastructure includes a data management capability as well.
“You need a system or a collection of systems that will let you access the right pieces of data,” Halvorsen says. “Then, you need a system that lets you deploy that data, often to an edge environment.”