OmniSci Onstage: Highlights from GTC 2019 and the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit

From Orlando, Florida all the way to San Jose, California, OmniSci stayed busy earlier this month, taking the stage at two major industry conferences to share how GPU-accelerated analytics are changing the game by allowing users to find previously undiscovered insights in their data. NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) took place March 18-21 with over 9,000 developers, researchers, and technologists in attendance. Happening concurrently in Orlando, Florida, was the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit, where more than 4,000 attendees gathered to discuss the future of data science and analytics. Our participation included hands-on workshops, keynote demonstrations, joint presentations with customers, and more.

OmniSci in the Spotlight at GTC 2019

In this year’s GTC keynote, NVIDIA Founder, President, and CEO Jensen Huang invited to the stage, Aaron Williams, OmniSci VP of Global Community. Williams shared how GPU-accelerated analytics are helping a major multi-service operator decide where to build future Wi-Fi access points for over 25 million subscribers, in order to help the company offload traffic from 500,000 LTE towers. The multi-service operator generates a terabyte of data each day, and transforming that data into actionable insights can help the provider optimize traffic, save money, and ultimately improve customer service. The real-time interactive data science and predictive analytics shown in the demo were made possible by a combination of GPU-accelerated software from OmniSci and Datalogue, RAPIDS, and NVIDIA-powered Data Science Workstations made available by BOXX Technologies.  View the demo here.

“Delivering near real-time data science is a game changer when it comes to making sense of our network data. Before, we had access to terabytes of data daily with no efficient way to gain insights out of it. Now, every time we look at the data, we see something new that we can take immediate advantage of,” said the Director of Wireless Engineering at the major multi-service operator. “This is made possible by NVIDIA-powered Data Science Workstations at our desks. The combination of RAPIDS along with software from Datalogue and OmniSci completely changes the way we collect, process, visualize and understand data. We are able to build models to predict high-surge Wi-Fi usage, offload access points swiftly and streamline operations to save millions of dollars.”

During VC day at GTC, Todd Mostak, OmniSci Founder and CEO, was also invited onstage with Huang, this time for an exclusive fireside chat. Mostak participated as a discussion moderator along with Jeff Herbst, VP of Business Development at NVIDIA, and Eli David, CTO at Deep Instinct. The fireside chat covered a broad range of topics, including the data science pipeline, NVIDIA’s acquisition of high-performance computing equipment maker Mellanox Technologies, and NVIDIA's long-term vision and approach to transforming itself.

Top: Aaron Williams, OmniSci VP of Global Community, gave a live demo during the GTC keynote. Bottom: OmniSci Founder & CEO, Todd Mostak, chats with NVIDIA Founder, President, and CEO Jensen Huang during VC day at GTC 2019.

OmniSci Use Cases Take the Stage

First, Caroline Persson, Data Scientist of BMW Group, and Todd Mostak, CEO of OmniSci, lead a session on “How BMW Visualizes and Interacts with Extreme Datasets with Near Zero Latency.” This session focused on connected vehicles and how vehicle usage, fleet movement, mobility patterns, telematics and spatiotemporal data are invaluable for the automobile industry, as they have become a treasure trove of anonymized data. Persson and Mostak discussed how the BMW Group has built dashboards with OmniSci Immerse to visualize telematics data, and  presented a live demonstration of how the dashboard is used to visualize spatiotemporal telematics data and interact with massive datasets-in-motion. They explained how the parallel processing power of GPUs unlocks a wealth of use cases across manufacturing and other major industries, driving operational analytics, geospatial analytics, and data science. View the full session.

“The amount of data is increasingly growing and that comes with a lot of challenges, in order to be able to process our data and interact with it. Here is where we saw the advantage of using GPU technologies.” - Caroline Persson (Data Scientist, BMW Group)

Also, two OmniSci leaders, Aaron Williams, VP of Global Community, and Venkat Krishnamurthy, VP of Product, spoke about “OmniSci and RAPIDS: End-to-End Open source Data Science Workflow.” The duo discussed how the OmniSci GPU-accelerated SQL engine fits into the overall RAPIDS partner ecosystem for open source GPU analytics. Using open data, they showed how to ingest data from both streaming and standing sources, perform descriptive statistics and feature engineering using SQL and cuDF, and return the results as a GPU dataframe. They also shared how a data science workflow can be accomplished using tools from the RAPIDS ecosystem, all without the data ever leaving the GPU. View the full session.

“This is where we are headed towards, this ability to bring together the RAPIDS suite of machine learning algorithms and tools in a very efficient way using our Arrow output, do this machine workflow in Jupyter Notebooks, and then push this result back into code. You have an end-to-end cyclical workflow of data exploration in a visual manner, deeper data exploration in model building in a Jupyter Notebook, then push the results back into a database for visualization.” - Venkat Krishnamurthy (VP of Product Management, OmniSci)

OmniSci leaders gave multiple presentations at GTC 2019 in San Jose.

Meanwhile, in Orlando...

At the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit, Grant Halloran, OmniSci EVP and Chief Commercial Officer, and Ryan McMahon, Vice President of Marketing at Cambridge Mobile Telematics, lead the session, “Interacting with Massive Mobile Telematics Datasets at Near Zero Latency.” This demonstration was an eye-opener for organizations seeking to create commercial and social benefits from vehicle telematics. Halloran spoke about how vehicles have become massive generators of data, and how the problems and opportunities of interrogating this torrent of information at speed will be immense. The OmniSci demo highlighted how GPU-accelerated analytics can help users process and analyze billions of rows of data in milliseconds.

OmniSci Chief Commercial Officer, Grant Halloran, onstage at Gartner Data and Analytics Summit.

The OmniSci Grand Prix

In the GTC exhibit hall, OmniSci revved things up with a physical racing rig that was hooked up to the Codemasters F1 video game. The rig streamed real-time telematics data from the virtual race car as attendees tried their hand at driving laps around the track. Information was collected on a total of 380 laps, adding 240 million records to our telematics dataset. Data that was collected included car position on the track, telemetry data (engine RPM, steering angle, engine/brake temperature, throttle, G-force), car setup data (downforce, tire pressure, wing angles), and current car status (damaged, fuel in the tank, tire wear). Read more about the data collection process and analysis in this blog or visit our GitHub.

GTC attendees tried to beat the fastest lap time in the inaugural OmniSci Grand Prix.

What’s Next

Catch OmniSci at an upcoming event! OmniSci leaders will be exhibiting and speaking at HackSC April 12-14, FOSS4G April 16-18, and the DS3 Datathon on April 20.