How to provision a POWER-based GPU server with IBM Visual Insights on your own Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and build a deep learning image classification model.

This blog post is an excerpt from a recently published solution tutorial that walks you through provisioning a dedicated backend virtual server instance (VSI) of IBM Visual Insights (previously PowerAI Vision) in IBM Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) through IBM Cloud Schematics. 

Once provisioned, you will upload an image data set and train, deploy, and test an optimized deep learning (image classification) model through a GPU on the VSI. You will also deploy a frontend web application through IBM Cloud Schematics to a new VSI on the same IBM Cloud VPC. Once deployed, you will upload an image for classification by communicating with the backend-deployed model exposed an an API.

IBM Visual Insights

Videos and images have become one of the most interesting data sets for artificial intelligence. In particular, deep learning is being used to create models for computer vision, and you can train these models to let your applications recognize what an image (or video) represents.

IBM Visual Insights is the new name for the product formerly called IBM PowerAI Vision. It is a new generation video and image analysis platform that offers built-in deep learning models that learn to analyze images and video streams for classification and object detection. IBM Visual Insights includes tools and interfaces that allow anyone with limited skills in deep learning technologies to get up and running quickly and easily. And, because IBM Visual Insights is built on open source frameworks for modeling and managing containers, it delivers a highly available platform that includes application life-cycle support, centralized management and monitoring, and support from IBM. 

As part of the latest release, IBM Visual Insights added support for multiple platforms, including x86-based GPU servers, in addition to the existing support for POWER-based GPU servers. IBM Visual Insights also delivers edge solutions through an iOS application called IBM Visual Inspector that can be downloaded on iOS devices.

Architecture

IBM Cloud Schematics delivers Terraform-as-a-Service so that you can use a high-level scripting language to model the resources that you want in your IBM Cloud environment and enable Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC).

Objectives

Following the instructions in the tutorial, you will achieve the following objectives:

• Use Schematics to deploy a virtual server instance running IBM Visual Insights on Power CPU in IBM Cloud VPC.
• Train and test an image classification model.
• Augment the VPC environment by deploying an image classification application to a new virtual server instance.

Get started

For step-by-step instructions, check out the solution tutorial.