VAST Data Unveils the Operating System for the Thinking Machine

VAST Data and Nebius Partner to Boost Global AI Adoption with On-Demand Cloud

Organizations can now easily deploy, operate and observe agentic pipelines; leverage pre-built agents  provided by VAST Data; connect, learn and collaborate to program workflows at global events

VAST Data, unveiled the result of  nearly a decade of relentless innovation with the unveiling of the VAST AI Operating System, a  revolutionary platform purpose-built to fuel the next wave of AI breakthroughs. 

Since the beginning of computing, every major technological revolution has been defined by the  emergence of a new operating system. From the PC, to mobile, to the cloud – a unified software layer  has abstracted complexity, democratized the use of new hardware, and reshaped how the world  computes, communicates and innovates. 

Now, as AI redefines the fabric of business and society, the industry again finds itself at the dawn of a  new computing paradigm – one where trillions of intelligent agents will reason, communicate, and act  across a global grid of millions of GPUs that are woven across edge deployments, AI factories and cloud  data centers. To make this world accessible, programmable, and operational at extreme scale, a new  generation of intelligent systems requires a new software foundation. 

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This is the moment VAST Data was built for.  

The VAST AI Operating System is the product of nearly ten years of engineering toward a single purpose:  to create an intelligent platform architecture that can harness this new generation of AI supercomputing  machinery and unlock the potential of AI at scale. Developed from a clean sheet of paper, the platform is  built on VAST’s groundbreaking Disaggregated and Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture, the world’s  first true parallel distributed system architecture – making it possible to completely parallelize AI and analytics workloads, federate clusters into a unified computing and data cloud and then feed new AI  workloads with near-infinite amounts of data from one fast and affordable tier of storage. Today, DASE  clusters support over 1 million GPUs around the world in many of the world’s most data intensive  computing centers. 

The scope of the AI OS is broad and will consolidate disparate legacy IT technologies into one simple and  modern offering designed to democratize AI computing. What VAST was inventing from the start was  conceived not as a collection of features, but as an entirely new computing substrate — one that unifies  data, compute, messaging, and reasoning. A system built to capture data from the natural world at  extreme scale, enrich it with AI-driven context in real time, and drive agentic workflows. Today, that  invention takes shape as the VAST AI Operating System… a continuation of VAST’s pursuit toward  building a Thinking Machine.

“This isn’t a product release — it’s a milestone in the evolution of computing,” said Renen Hallak, CEO  and Co-Founder of VAST Data. “We’ve spent the past decade reimagining how data and intelligence  converge. Today, we’re proud to unveil the AI Operating System for a world that is no longer built around  applications — but around agents.” 

The AI Operating System consists of every aspect of a distributed system to run AI at global scale: a  kernel to run platform services on from private to public cloud, a runtime to deploy AI agents with,  eventing infrastructure for real-time event processing, messaging infrastructure, and a distributed file and  database storage system that can be used for real-time data capture and analytics. 

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Introducing the VAST AgentEngine

This year, AI models and agents now come to life within the VAST AI Operating System. In 2024, we  previewed the VAST InsightEngine – a service that extracts context from unstructured data using AI embedding tools. If the VAST InsightEngine prepares data for AI using AI, AgentEngine is how AI now  comes to life with data – an auto-scaling AI agent deployment runtime that equips users with a low-code  environment to build intelligent workflows, select reasoning models, define agent tools, and operationalize reasoning. 

The AgentEngine features a new AI agent tool server that provides support for agents to invoke data,  metadata, functions, web search or other agents using them as MCP-compatible tools. AgentEngine  allows agents to assume multiple personas with different purpose and security credentials and enjoy secure, real-time access to different tools. The platform’s scheduler and fault-tolerant queuing  mechanisms also ensure agent resilience against machine or service failure. 

Finally, AgentEngine is introducing massively-scalable agentic workflow observability – with VAST’s  approach to parallel, distributed tracing – the VAST AI OS makes it simple for developers to enjoy a  unified and simple view into massively-scaled and complex agentic pipelines. 

Just as operating systems ship with pre-built utilities, the VAST AgentEngine will feature a set of open source Agents that VAST will release, one per month, to help accelerate the journey to AI computing.  Some personal assistants will be tailored to industry use cases, whereas others will be designed for  general purpose use. Examples include: 

  • A reasoning chatbot, powered by all of your VAST data 
  • A data engineering agent to curate data automatically 
  • A prompt engineer to help optimize AI workflow inputs 
  • An agent agent, to automate the deployment, evaluation and improvement of agents
  • A compliance agent, to enforce data and activity level regulatory compliance
  • An editor agent, to create rich media content 
  • A life sciences researcher, to assist with bioinformatic discovery  

In the spirit of enabling organizations to build and build fast on the VAST AI Operating System, VAST  Data will be hosting a series of global workshops, both in-person and online, throughout the year. These  workshops will include training on components of the Operating System and sessions on how to develop  on the platform.  

AI Tech Insights: VAST Data and Nebius Partner to Boost Global AI Adoption with On-Demand Cloud

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