• Intel Pumps Funds Into Data Processing In All Shapes And Sizes

    October 20, 2017

    Intel’s multi-year effort to expand its reach beyond its PC and server processor roots has taken the chip maker down multiple paths, some of which have ended in dead ends.

    The most memorable of those was the billion-plus-dollar attempt to challenge ARM Holdings and its various partners – such as Qualcomm and Samsung – in making chips for mobile devices. Under current CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel has retrenched, dropping its mobile device efforts and pulling back from wearables, and instead is pushing to provide the foundational technologies that will underpin the trends that will continue to shape the industry, from …

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  • The IBM Transformation Can Gather Steam Now

    October 19, 2017

    For the past five and a half years, which is not quite an eternity in the IT business but is something akin to a half of a generation or so, IBM’s revenues have been declining, quarter in and quarter out. As has happened many, many times in its more than century of existence, Big Blue, which used to be a peddler of meat slicers, time machines, scales, and punch card tabulators early in its history, has had to constantly evolve and reimagine itself.

    The transformation that IBM had to undergo in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a near …

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  • IBM Preps Power9 For AI And HPC Launch, Forges Big NUMA Iron

    October 16, 2017

    After a long, long wait and years of anticipation, it looks like IBM is finally getting ready to ship commercial versions of its Power9 chips, and as expected, its first salvo of processors aimed at the datacenter will be aimed at HPC, data analytics, and machine learning workloads.

    We are also catching wind about IBM’s Power9-based scale-up NUMA machines, which will debut sometime next year and take on big iron systems based on Intel Xeon SP, Oracle Sparc M8, and Fujitsu Sparc64-XII processors as well as give some competition to IBM’s own System z14 mainframes.

    The US Department …

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  • New Optimizations Improve Deep Learning Frameworks For CPUs

    October 13, 2017 James Reinders

    Today, most machine learning is done on processors. Some would say that acceleration of learning has to be done on GPUs, but for most users that is not good advice for several reasons. The biggest reason is now the Intel Xeon SP processor, formerly codenamed “Skylake.”

    Up until recently, the software for machine learning has been often more optimized for GPUs than anything else. A series of efforts by Intel have changed that – and when coupled with Platinum version of the Intel Xeon SP family, the top performance gap is closer to 2X than it is to 100X. This …

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  • Japan’s ABCI System Shows The Subtleties Separating AI And HPC

    October 12, 2017

    Governments like to spread the money around their indigenous IT companies when they can, and so it is with the AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure, or ABCI, supercomputer that is being commissioned by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan. NEC built the ABCI prototype last year, and now Fujitsu has been commissioned to build the actual ABCI system.

    The resulting machine, which is being purchased specifically to offer cloud access to compute and storage capacity for artificial intelligence and data analytics workloads, would make a fine system for running HPC simulation and models. But that …

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  • IBM Combines PowerAI, Data Science Experience in Enterprise AI Push

    October 12, 2017

    IBM has spent the past several years putting a laser focus on what it calls cognitive computing, using its Watson platform as the foundation for its efforts in such emerging fields as artificial intelligence (AI) and is successful spinoff, deep learning. Big Blue has leaned on Watson technology, its traditional Power systems, and increasingly powerful GPUs from Nvidia to drive its efforts to not only bring AI and deep learning into the cloud, but also to push AI into the enterprise.

    The technologies are part of a larger push in the industry to help enterprises transform their businesses to take …

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  • Baidu Sheds Precision Without Paying Deep Learning Accuracy Cost

    October 11, 2017

    One of the reasons we have written so much about Chinese search and social web giant, Baidu, in the last few years is because they have openly described both the hardware and software steps to making deep learning efficient and high performance at scale.

    In addition to providing several benchmarking efforts and GPU use cases, researchers at the company’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) have been at the forefront of eking power efficiency and performance out of new hardware by lowering precision. This is a trend that has kickstarted similar thinking in hardware usage in other areas, including supercomputing …

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  • Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push

    October 2, 2017

    Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan.

    The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD’s Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single …

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  • Live Today : HPC, Machine Learning, And Security – Can HPC Be Self Healing?

    October 1, 2017

    SPONSORED WEBCAST

    October 18 at 10 am Eastern / 15:00 UK this free webcast will broadcast live.

    In this webcast, we learn from Nick Curcuru, vice president of the big data practice at MasterCard, about what needs to be in place both technically and in terms of management models and processes so that the benefits can be fully achieved.

    High performance computing, long the domain of research centers and academia, is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream IT infrastructure and being opened up to a broader range of enterprise workloads, and in recent years, that includes big data analytics and …

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  • Anaconda Teams With Microsoft In Machine Learning Push

    September 28, 2017

    Microsoft is embedding Anaconda’s Python distribution into its Azure Machine Learning products, the latest move by the software vendor to expand its capabilities in the fast-growing artificial intelligence space and an example of Anaconda extending its reach beyond high performance computing and into AI.

    The two companies announced the partnership this week at the Strata Data Conference in New York City, with the news dovetailing with other announcements around AI that Microsoft officials made this week at its own Ignite 2017 show. The vendors said they will offer Anaconda for Microsoft, which they described as a subset of the Anaconda …

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