Red Hat Unveils Enterprise-Ready AI Distribution

Red Hat has revealed RHEL AI, a new distribution specifically designed for machine learning tasks, and a new image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat, a leading provider of open-source solutions, has announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), a new distribution specifically designed for machine learning tasks. This distribution aims to simplify the creation of server solutions that use large conversational models.

RHEL AI includes a selection of tools and frameworks for machine learning, as well as drivers for using various hardware accelerators from AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. It also includes components for harnessing the capabilities of Dell, Cisco, HPE, Lenovo, and SuperMicro servers optimized for AI systems.

One of the key features of RHEL AI is its support for the Granite language model, an open-source model developed by IBM and released under the Apache 2.0 license. The Granite model is capable of considering up to 4 thousand tokens and covering 7 billion parameters when generating text. To interact with the Granite model, RHEL AI includes the open InstructLab toolkit, which supports the LAB (Large-scale Alignment for chatBots) methodology for customizing and optimizing models, as well as adding additional knowledge and implementing new skills in pre-trained models.

RHEL AI can be used to develop an AI application for corporate needs and to implement services for generating content, creating dialog systems, and integrating virtual assistants into applications. These virtual assistants can support skills such as the ability to answer questions in natural language, solve mathematical problems, and generate meaningful text in a given topic, compose a summary of the content, correct errors in the text, rewrite in other words, help in writing code in various programming languages, generate letters and documents using a template.

In addition to RHEL AI, Red Hat has also introduced a new mode for creating and managing system images based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux – “image mode”. This new mode allows you to use the tools and technologies used to create and run application containers to deploy the operating system. The new mode manipulates monolithic system images, generated using the rpm-ostree toolkit and updated atomically without breaking into separate packages.

Builds can be generated as images in OCI (as in Docker), ISO, QCOW2, AMI, VMI, and VMDK formats. The contents of the image are selected by editing the Containerfile. Standard container management tools such as Podman and OpenShift Container Platform can be used to create and manage images. To install images, you can use either the standard Anaconda installer or the bootc-image-builder toolkit, which allows you to convert a container image into a bootable disk image. The bootc toolkit is used to update bootable images of containers that come with the Linux kernel and can boot in the same way as regular system builds.

This new image mode allows for a more streamlined and efficient way of creating and managing system images, making it easier for organizations to deploy and manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Considering the AI wave, it is a significant steps for RHEL to pivot into AI-first Linux distribution, powered by IBM’s open-source Granite model.

Currently, the RHEL AI is in developer preview as of publishing this. You can access it via the below link.

https://github.com/RedHatOfficial/rhelai-dev-preview

Via Red Hat press release

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