NVIDIA’s Vishal Dhupar talks about Omniverse, Leveraging India’s talent and upcoming GTC
American multinational tech company NVIDIA Corporation is not a new name in the tech ecosystem. Founded by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, NVIDIA designs processing units for gaming and professional markets, as well as system-on-a-chip units for mobile computing and the automotive industry. In a recent conversation with Analytics India Magazine, Vishal Dhupar – Managing Director of Asia South at NVIDIA, talked about the company’s vision for India. With over three decades of leadership and customer engagement experience in the technology industry, Vishal is a veteran in this field, with a passion for customer success as the foundation of his leadership. He has managed and led companies to a leadership position across diverse businesses – Servers, Graphics, Engineering Design, Security, Networking and Data Storage. As the Managing Director at NVIDIA, Vishal is responsible for all aspects of business operations – sales, marketing, operations, and channels in South Asia economies. He is responsible for developing and maintaining relations with the government, public institutions and industry representatives’ bodies. Edited excerpts from the conversation: AIM: Is NVIDIA more ML developer-focused, or is it focusing on businesses adopting its products? Vishal Dhupar: Jensen (Huang) himself has always believed that game plan is more important than the score. One may get there eventually, but to drive efficiency, a solid game plan is always going to be the key requisite NVIDIA’s technology has been widely adopted in India. Having said that, India is a Developer Nation. Therefore, our current focus lies on skilling students studying engineering, science and design, while helping the industry to reskill their teams. We work through the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) skilling mandate, as well as our own Deep Learning Institute. Our purpose at NVIDIA is to increase the awareness of accelerated computing, for which we conduct workshops, hackathons, and boot camps to enable students and developers to apply technology to solve our country’s most challenging problems. We partner with academia and researchers to ensure they have the right technology and platforms for best-in-class Artificial Intelligence Centres of Excellence. AIM: What is NVIDIA focusing on at present? Vishal Dhupar: We are currently looking forward to GTC, which will provide a great opportunity for developers to learn the latest advancements in AI, accelerated computing and computer graphics from the world’s top innovators, scientists, and researchers. In addition, startups, academia, and the largest enterprises will all come together at GTC, giving participants a unique opportunity to share ideas and collaborate on creating the future. NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute (DLI) University Ambassador Program helps to skill and certify engineering students for free. DLI Ambassadors are given access to high-quality, hands-on course materials and a fully configured, GPU-accelerated workstation in the cloud. These workshops are delivered remotely through a virtual classroom, free of cost for faculty and students. The value that colleges see is not just in the infrastructure grant that they get, but more importantly, in the software, learning and mentorship, that we bring to them. AIM: How have things changed with you and NVIDIA in the last one and a half years, ever since the pandemic? Vishal Dhupar: It has been dramatic. Despite being in the same city, we are on a virtual call. Someone like me, who would travel three days a week to meet customers and partners, participate in multiple meetings, now I am almost taking the shape of the chair that I am sitting on (laughs). We have all been witness to the accelerated digital transformation that has taken place recently and NVIDIA has played a significant role in this. Moving forward, a collaboration between departments is going to be extremely critical. NVIDIA brings to the forefront, a seamless amalgamation of the virtual and physical world with NVIDIA Omniverse. Individuals and teams in STEM and across domains can now collaborate in real-time with the data characteristics in Omniverse. The pandemic has highlighted the power of collaboration in a hybrid world. There is a big shift in software, and I believe that the whole world is going to be software-driven. With modern applications coming into play, the world is ushering into software 2.0 where the work of software engineers is also augmented by machines capable of writing the software. AIM: What do you think about this whole push for creating semiconductors in India? Vishal Dhupar: The semiconductor plays a vital role today, as it is building the foundation of the digital world. Nations are making decisions on whether they wish to build indigenous semiconductors or employ other infrastructure. For nations to be self-sufficient in the same, it is imperative to have a clear vision and objective as to where the return of investment lies. One of the greatest opportunities for our industry to make an impact on the larger economy is by using AI to break the language barrier. Thus, if we really want to solve the problem, we should have a vision and not just get excited about it. AIM: NVIDIA is still only related to GPU, whereas the company has evolved way beyond it. Do you have any initiative to shed that image? Vishal Dhupar: There are four points that make NVIDIA unique. Firstly, NVIDIA is a pioneering accelerated computing company. We work in the domains of graphics, HPC, and AI and we are world-class in the domains we play in, with leading market share and position. Secondly, NVIDIA is a full-stack computing company, working in three major layers: chips and systems (HW layer), acceleration libraries (middleware or AI OS layer), and application frameworks (application layer). Thirdly, NVIDIA is also a data centre scale company. We have a rich software stack and innovate end to end across the entire stack. Our full-stack is confidential (key for privacy), safe (key for autonomous AI), secure (key in a world with cyber threats), and manageable (key for optimized operations. Lastly, NVIDIA is an open computing platform company. Our customers and partners across many markets can build profitable businesses on our open platforms. Because of our pursuit, as a computing platform company that solves the unsolvable, we create markets or dynamics. AIM: What are your thoughts about NVIDIA’s Omniverse? Are there any plans for India? Vishal Dhupar: Digital transformation can help us collaborate better in the virtual world, and we should take it as a fabulous opportunity of converting our ideas into reality. One thing that we have experienced in the last year is that it is possible to collaborate. If we all appreciate the fact that there is not one universe, but there are multiple universes, imagine the economy we are talking about. I am very excited about it, and I think India should understand this move. India is a nation of developers and we have the potential to be the AI factory for the world, both in research and implementation. NVIDIA’s upcoming virtual and free developer conference, NVIDIA GTC 2021 brings hundreds of deep technical sessions for Indian developers to view and learn from. I strongly encourage our developer community to register and benefit from GTC 2021 here: www.nvidia.com/gtc/?ncid=GTC-NVRBIDDAPPA To know what to expect from NVIDIA’s GTC 2021, click here.
As the Managing Director of Asia South at NVIDIA, Vishal Dhupar is responsible for all aspects of business operations – sales, marketing, operations and channels in India and South Asia economies.
As the Managing Director of Asia South at NVIDIA, Vishal Dhupar is responsible for all aspects of business operations - sales, marketing, operations and channels in India and South Asia economies.
["GTC Conference", "Interviews and Discussions", "NVIDIA"]
["Go", "artificial intelligence", "AI", "GTC Conference", "ML", "Git", "RAG", "Aim", "deep learning", "analytics", "NVIDIA", "R", "Interviews and Discussions"]
["AI", "artificial intelligence", "ML", "deep learning", "analytics", "Aim", "RAG", "R", "Go", "Git"]
After diving deep into the Indian startup ecosystem, Debolina is now a Technology Journalist. When not writing, she is found reading or playing with paint brushes and palette knives. She can be reached at debolina.biswas@analyticsindiamag.com