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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Challenging The Uber Syndrome

Just yesterday, Grab announced its acquisition of Uber across South East Asia. Uber customers received notification that the Uber app will cease operations on 8th April in Singapore. While many bet on the winners and losers, one thing is for sure – the industry disruption continues.

Uber's Innovation To Success

Uber is synonymous with innovation and cross-industry disruption. When Uber surfaced in San Francisco in Mar 2009, it created a massive transformation in the transportation industry. 

Taxi companies no longer had monopoly of the business of transporting passengers. People could find peer to peer ride sharing, deliver and transportation via an on-line app. It offered convenience, transparent pricing and better service as the nearest drivers could be alerted saving time and passengers can track where the drivers are for visibility and safety. People found employment and free-lance opportunities to make a living that was convenient to their timing and location too.

The Uber Syndrome

Today, we use the term “The Uber Syndrome” to describe industry disruptions “where a competitor with a completely different business model enters your industry and flattens you.” This is a powerful quote from Judy Lemke, CIO of the Schneider Trucking Company. And growing meteorically from sheer entrepreneurship!

In the past, strategic change and management consultancies talked about business model optimization and creating viable independent business models. I studied my Masters of Business Administation and wrote my paper on the Viable System Model from Professor Stafford Beer who revolutionalized the Chile economy. 

That was great and is still used today in corporate restructuring and optimizing organizational efficiency. On top of that, executives now need to worry about competitors with new business models, who arise from outside the recognized landscape of traditional competition.

New Competitors That Aren't Classified As Competitors

IBM Institute of Business Value conducted the world’s largest Global C-Suite Study among CEO, CFOs and CMOs, the words "Uber-ized", "Uber-ization", "Uber Syndrome" and "digital invaders" were among the top concerns. The most striking quote from all the quotes collected from the executives - that is typical of what keeps executive awake at night is “The biggest threat is new competitors that aren’t classified as competitors”.

An executive from the study told us that he spends much of his time surveying the landscape of everything that is happening, constantly trying to apply his judgment to decide whether something is just a passing fad or hype that can be safely ignored, if it is a serious trend that needs to be addressed in a timely way, or if it is a tsunami that threatens to rise up and wipe you entirely off the map. Those are the worries that are causing top corporate executives to lose sleep these days.

Then there is the issue of competition across industries – or to put it another way, the blurring of lines between industries, and the threat of new, non-traditional forms of competition.

Whoever Dominates Data Science Wins

In fact, a full 54% of retail executives we talked to said that they expect competition from outside the industry to be more significant and impactful than competition from within the industry over the next several years.

More so than ever, data science plays a critical role to how executives can stay ahead of the competition. Our team at Systems on Cloud at Asia Pacific work daily with executives on cognitive computing, analytics, big data and artificial intelligence to power their journey ahead. For those new to Artificial Intelligence, we offer a discovery workshop where they can understand what it takes from data, resources and skills to embark on this journey.

Whoever dominates the data science wins. 

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Credits: Blog photo from Grab advertisement.

Try Your Hand At Quantum Computing

Following Watson, blockchain and artificial intelligence, quantum computing may provide the next powerful set of services delivered to solve our industry issues. Fortune 500 firms are trying their hand at Quantum Computing.

Quantum computing is a term that’s becoming more mainstream, but its complex nature means it’s not well understood beyond quantum physicists. 

What is quantum computing?

It is a computing model that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to process data. Quantum computing uses quantum bits or quits that can represent a one, a zero, or both at once. This is in contract to the binary digits used by classical computing.

From bits to quits

Quantum computing process information in quantum bits, or quits, which can hold more information than their classical counterparts and solve problems faster and more efficiently.

For the more technical, entangled quits in a superposition can be correlated with each other; that is, the state of one (whether it is a 1 or a 0) can depend on the state of another. A superposition is a principle of quantum theory that means each qubit can represent both a 1 and a 0 at the same time.

What about AI?

While technologies like AI or Artificial Intelligence , can find patterns buried in vast amounts of existing data, quantum computers will deliver solutions to important problems where patterns cannot be seen and the number of possibilities that you need to explore to get to the answer are too enormous ever to be processed by classical computers.

Examples of where Quantum Computing is creating breakthroughs

• In healthcare to advance the discovery of new medicines and materials by helping us untangle the complexities of molecular and chemical interactions. 

• In banking to make better investments by finding new ways to model financial data and isolate key global risk factors.

• In supply chain and logistics by finding the optimal routes across global systems like optimizing fleet operations for deliveries during the holiday season.

Where are we with Quantum Computing?

We are currently in a period of history when we can prepare for a future where quantum computers offer a clear computational advantage for solving important problems that are currently intractable. This is the “quantum ready” phase.

Think of it this way: What if everyone in the 1960s had a decade to prepare for PCs, from hardware to programming over the cloud, while they were still prototypes? In hindsight, we can all see that jumping in early would have been the right call. That’s where we are with quantum computing today. Now is the time to begin exploring what we can do with quantum computers, across a variety of potential applications. Those who wait until fault-tolerance might risk losing out on much nearer-term opportunities.

What is IBM's role?

Following Watson and blockchain, quantum computing may provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud.

IBM Q is an industry-first initiative to build commercially available universal quantum computing systems for business and science. Today, IBM has a sophisticated prototype commercial quantum processor that will form the core of the first IBM Q early-access commercial systems for clients.

Leading Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, and research labs are joining IBM Q Network to explore practical applications of quantum computing for business and science. The IBM Q Network provides organizations with quantum expertise, resources, and cloud-based access to the most advanced quantum systems.

Watch this video that explains quantum computing

See how playing cards can help us understand the unique way quantum computers work.  https://youtu.be/5faqB9YLS_8

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