Dell CPU-Based AI PoC for Retail

As part of Dell’s ongoing efforts to help make industry-leading AI workflows available to its clients, this paper outlines a sample AI solution for the retail market. The PoC leverages Dell™ technology to showcase an AI-powered inventory management application for retail organizations.

AI technology has been in development for some time, but recent technological advancements have greatly accelerated AI’s ability to provide value across a wide range of enterprise applications. AI solutions have become a key initiative for many organizations. While the advancement of AI technology provides the basis for a diverse set of AI-powered applications, the specific requirements of different verticals provide distinct hardware and software challenges. IT organizations might be unsure of the technical requirements for deploying such a solution. This uncertainty may be due to unfamiliarity with AI, as well as an expectation that AI applications will require specialized hardware, often with limited availability.

This paper covers a solution specifically designed to capture the requirements of a retail-based AI deployment using a standard AMD™ CPU for AI training and inference. The solution leverages hardware from Dell, AMD , and Broadcom™, to create a solution powerful enough to capture and analyze large-scale video data from cameras in retail environments, as well as flexible enough to scale to the unique needs of individual retail environments. Training of the model was achieved in two days, utilizing the same Dell PowerEdge server that is used for inferencing. The scalability of the solution was tested with up to 20 video streams. The PoC additionally demonstrates AI optimizations for AMD CPUs by utilizing AMD’s ZenDNN library. The utilization of the ZenDNN library, along with node pinning, resulted in an average throughput increase of 1.5x.

While the overall applications of AI in retail environments are much broader than the single inventory management solution outlined in this paper, the PoC demonstrates a framework for how IT organizations can quickly deploy an AI solution that delivers practical value in a retail environment by using readily available hardware.