AI for Any Environment, All the Time

In this special guest feature, our friends over at Advantech takes a look at the shift to edge computing environments versus large, secure data centers, a trend in stark contrast to the other end of the spectrum where large cloud providers and on-premise data centers offer a wide range of computing, networking and storage options within carefully controlled environments. Ultimately, we need both based on their respective value. But if we look deeper into what lies between the two extremes, we find the hybrid – rugged systems that bring the high-performance data center computing power and functionality to the edge. Advantech is a global leader in the fields of IoT intelligent systems and embedded platforms.

The true cost of AI innovation

“As the world’s attention has shifted to climate change, the field of AI is beginning to take note of its carbon cost. Research done at the Allen Institute for AI by Roy Schwartz et al. raises the question of whether efficiency, alongside accuracy, should become an important factor in AI research, and suggests that AI scientists ought to deliberate if the massive computational power needed for expensive processing of models, colossal amounts of training data, or huge numbers of experiments is justified by the degree of improvement in accuracy.”

Podcast: How crowd-sourced supercomputing is helping fight COVID-19

In this Roadhouse podcast, Dr. Greg Bowman from Folding @ Home describes the how crowdsourced computing is being used to fight the coronavirus and how we can get involved. “We are excited to announce a new batch of small molecule screening simulations are now up and running on Folding@home! These simulations will help prioritize which molecules will be synthesized and assayed by the COVID Moonshot aiming to rapidly developing new therapies against the SARS-CoV-2 main viral protease.”

Podcast: Taking a Look at HPC-as-a-Service

In this SpotlightON podcast, Robert Stober from Bright Computing is joined by Adnan Khaleel, Global Sales Strategist for HPC, AI and Deep Learning at Dell Technologies. Together, they discuss the subject of HPC as a service: What it means, how it is different from traditional HPC, and what the benefits are.

Interview: Under Secretary Paul Dabbar on the COVID-19 HPC Consortium

The DOE laboratory complex has many core capabilities that can be applied to addressing the threats posed by COVID-19. “This public-private partnership includes the biggest players in advanced computing from government, industry, and academia. At launch, the consortium includes five DOE laboratories, industry leaders like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and preeminent U.S. universities like MIT, RPI, and UC San Diego. And within a week, we’ve already received more than a dozen requests from other organizations to join the consortium.”

Podcast: A Look inside the El Capitan Supercomputer coming to LLNL

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some of the more interesting configuration aspects of the pending El Capitan exascale supercomputer coming to LLNL in 2023. “Dan talks about the briefing he received on the new Lawrence Livermore El Capitan system to be built by HPE/Cray. This new $600 million system will be fueled by the AMD Genoa processor coupled with AMD’s Instinct GPUs. Performance should come in at TWO 64-bit exaflops peak, which is very, very sporty.”

Video: Quantum Computing and Supercomputing, AI, Blockchain

Shahin Khan from OrionX.net gave this talk at the Washington Quantum Computing Meetup. “A whole new approach to computing (as in, not binary any more), quantum computing is as promising as it is unproven. Quantum computing goes beyond Moore’s law since every quantum bit (qubit) doubles the computational power, similar to the famous wheat and chessboard problem. So the payoff is huge, even though it is, for now, expensive, unproven, and difficult to use. But new players will become more visible, early use cases and gaps will become better defined, new use cases will be identified, and a short stack will emerge to ease programming.”

Manufacturing Engineers can turn to Cloud HPC for Work from Home

In this special guest feature, Wolfgang Gentzsch from the UberCloud describes how engineers can perform work from home in the same way they do at their offices, while maintaining or even increasing productivity. “In our short post, here, we are looking at how product development engineers – e.g. in manufacturing – are able to perform the same work they are used to perform at their office, maintaining (or even increasing) their productivity while working from home.”

New AI Solutions from Dell Technologies

In this special guest feature, Dave Frattura from Dell Technologies writes that the company is helping customers simplify and drive data science and AI initiatives that can deliver valuable insights, automation and intelligence to fuel innovation across their IT landscape — from edge locations to core data center and public clouds. “Dell has developed new solutions to help data scientists and developers get their AI applications and projects up and running without delay.”

Fast Track your AI Workflows

In this special guest feature, our friends over at Inspur write that for new workloads that are highly compute intensive, accelerators are often required. Accelerators can speed up the computation and allow for AI and ML algorithms to be used in real time. Inspur is a leading supplier of solutions for HPC and AI/ML workloads.