The Race for Speed and Performance with Artificial Intelligence

The F1 of computing

Last week, an industry leader commented, "Anne, there's no differentiation if you are selling a Mercedes to my client when he can have a BMW or Toyota." That's a typical thinking of many businessmen today when a car is a means of transport and speed is not crucial to his business survival. He can afford to be a little late with traffic and have budget to spend on a business lunch that may help him close a deal. But what if it was an intelligent car that could give him insights of the prospect while driving to lunch while his competitor drove a normal car?

Of course, he was referring cars as IT infrastructure - who cares if one server or cloud platform is faster than another. But that was yesterday's thinking, when a car or an infrastructure or network took you from one point to another. Even car manufacturers are looking into self-driving intelligent cars. Today, every industry business leader want insights and intelligence to set them apart from the competitors. Whoever gets the best technology with the most ground breaking and fastest insights gets the advantage to make the winning move. It is a race of speed, power and smarts.

AI Supercomputing handles 500,000 times Milky Way stars

" Supercomputing is the Formula One of computing. It's where companies test bleeding-edge technology at an unprecedented scale," says John Kelly, SVP, Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research.

IBM's vision of open source collaboration has led to the building of The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with Nvidia, Mellanox and Red Hat. Summit is now the most powerful and smartest supercomputer for science. It builds model supernovas, stimulate quantum mechanics materials, pioneer new nano-material fabrications and explore cancer, genetics and the environment. 

Imagine handling more than 200 quadrillion calculations per second (1 quadrillion is 10 to the power of 15). That's equivalent to 500,000 times the number of stars in the Milky Way, or store the entire word's social media data in one place.

“By building these supercomputers, we are building the world’s leading AI machines,” says Hillery Hunter, IBM Fellow; Director, Accelerated Cognitive Infrastructure.

Why should we get excited?

Those working on supercomputers can save the earth through research. We can do our part with our own little projects too. What's beautiful about this AI technology is that we can now make a difference ourselves.

1.  Everyone has access- these supercomputers are built with Power9 processors and IBM Storage which enterprise own for running traditional workloads.

2.  Anyone can be AI-ready- the AI workloads are not highly customised one-off HPC solutions, but they can be used for the enterprises.

3.  Anyone can Uberize your industry- The architecture is built on AI-purposed systems that have massive scalability. So once, you're ready to take the market by storm, you are all set!

How to get started:

• Select an AI use case & try out the PowerAI demo
• Have a chat with an AI user or meet up, or arrange for a PowerAI Exploration Workshop

Last Friday, I saw a Quality Manager at a manufacturing plant with no IT background design a simple AI solution on how to improve quality inspection using PowerAI Vision. It was so simple!

More about Summit the world's fastest and most powerful supercomputer:

https://youtu.be/rn1t_T2QbSY

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