• Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel?

    April 20, 2018

    Intel has been making some interesting moves in the community space recently, including free licenses for its compiler suite for educators and open source contributors can now be had, as can rotating 90 day licenses for its full System Studio environment for anyone who takes the time to sign up.

    In the AI space, Intel recently announced that its nGraph code for managing AI graph APIs has also been opened to the community. After opening it up last month, Intel has been followed up on the initial work on MXNet with further improvements to TensorFlow.

    The Next Platform …

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  • DHL Gets Logical – And Logistical – About Machine Learning

    April 18, 2018

    For the past several years, machine learning as evolved by the hyperscalers has been trickling down from on high, through frameworks and services, into enterprises.

    Machine learning is becoming a regular technique underpinning applications in a growing number of industries like manufacturing, energy, telecommunications and engineering, where companies see it as a way to not only reduce the costs and improve the efficiencies in their operations but also to more quickly detect patterns in and gain insights from the huge amounts of data they are generating. The goal is to making better and faster business decisions, and to …

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  • Building Bigger, Faster GPU Clusters Using NVSwitches

    April 13, 2018 Paul Teich

    Nvidia launched its second-generation DGX system in March. In order to build the 2 petaflops half-precision DGX-2, Nvidia had to first design and build a new NVLink 2.0 switch chip, named NVSwitch. While Nvidia is only shipping NVSwitch as an integral component of its DGX-2 systems today, Nvidia has not precluded selling NVSwitch chips to data center equipment manufacturers.

    This article will answer many of the questions we asked in our first look at the NVSwitch chip, using DGX-2 as an example architecture.

    Nvidia’s NVSwitch is a two-billion transistor non-blocking switch design incorporating 18 complete NVLink 2.0 ports …

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  • Talking Up the Expanding Markets for GPU Compute

    April 10, 2018

    There is a direct correlation between the length of time that Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang speaks during the opening keynote of each GPU Technology Conference and the total addressable market of accelerated computing based on GPUs.

    This stands to reason since the market for GPU compute is expanding. We won’t discuss which is the cause and which is the effect. Or maybe we will.

    It all started with offloading the parallel chunks of HPC applications from CPUs to GPUs in the early 2000s in academia, which were then first used in production HPC centers a decade …

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  • Riding the AI Cycle Instead of Building It

    April 10, 2018

    We all remember learning to ride a bike. Those early wobbly moments with “experts” holding on to your seat while you furiously peddled and tugged away at the handlebars trying to find your own balance.

    Training wheels were the obvious hardware choice for those unattended and slightly dangerous practice sessions. Training wheel hardware was often installed by your then “expert” in an attempt to avoid your almost inevitable trip to the ER. Eventually one day, often without planning you no longer needed the support, and you could make it all happen on your own.

    Today, AI and ML needs this …

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  • Deep Learning In R: Documentation Drives Algorithms

    April 9, 2018

    Hard to believe, but the R programming language has been with us since 1993.

    A quarter century has now passed since the authors Gentleman and Ihaka originally conceived the R platform as an implementation of the S programming language.

    Continuous global software development has taken the original concepts originally inspired by John Chambers’ Scheme in 1975 to now include parallel computing, bioinformatics, social science and more recently complex AI and deep learning methods. Layers have been built on top of layers and today’s R looks nothing like 1990’s R.

    So where are we at, especially with the emerging opportunities …

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  • AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database

    April 4, 2018

    Amazon Web Services essentially sparked the public cloud race a dozen years ago when it first launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and then in short order the Simple Storage Service (S3), giving enterprises access to the large amount compute and storage resources that its giant retail business leaned on.

    Since that time, AWS has grown rapidly in the number of services it offers, the number of customers it serves, the amount of money it brings in and the number of competitors – including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle – looking to chip away …

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  • Inside Nvidia’s NVSwitch GPU Interconnect

    April 4, 2018

    At the GPU Technology Conference last week, we told you all about the new NVSwitch memory fabric interconnect that Nvidia has created to link multiple “Volta” GPUs together and that is at the heart of the DGX-2 system that the company has created to demonstrate its capabilities and to use on its internal Saturn V supercomputer at some point in the future.

    Since the initial announcements, more details have been revealed by Nvidia about NVSwitch, including details of the chip itself and how it helps applications wring a lot more performance from the GPU accelerators.

    Our first observation upon looking …

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  • The Buck Stops – And Starts – Here For GPU Compute

    April 3, 2018

    Ian Buck doesn’t just run the Tesla accelerated computing business at Nvidia, which is one of the company’s fastest-growing and most profitable products in its twenty five year history. The work that Buck and other researchers started at Stanford University in 2000 and then continued at Nvidia helped to transform a graphics card shader into a parallel compute engine that is helping to solve some of the world’s toughest simulation and machine learning problems.

    The annual GPU Technology Conference was held by Nvidia last week, and we sat down and had a chat with Buck about a bunch of things …

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  • Momentum for Bioinspired GPU Computing at the Edge

    April 3, 2018

    Bioinspired computing is nothing new but with the rise in mainstream interest in machine learning, these architectures and software frameworks are seeing fresh light. This is prompting a new wave of young companies that are cropping up to provide hardware, software, and management tools—something that has also spurred a new era of thinking about AI problems.

    We most often think of these innovations happening at the server and datacenter level but more algorithmic work is being done (to suit better embedded hardware) to deploy comprehensive models on mobile devices that allow for long-term learning on single instances of object recognition …

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