Microsoft turns AI loose on new documents from JFK Investigation

In this video, researchers apply Microsoft Cognitive Search to find clues in newly released documents on the JFK assassination. “Late last year the US government released more than 34,000 pages related to the assassination of JFK. What if we could bring the full power of Microsoft’s AI to understand what was in those files and the vast scale of the Azure Cloud to handle the continual flow of data?”

Intel FPGAs Power Realtime AI in the Azure cloud

At the Microsoft Build conference held this week, Microsoft announced Azure Machine Learning Hardware Accelerated Models powered by Project Brainwave integrated with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning SDK. In this configuration, customers gain access to industry-leading artificial intelligence inferencing performance for their models using Azure’s large-scale deployments of Intel FPGA (field programmable gate array) technology. “With today’s announcement, customers can now utilize Intel’s FPGA and Intel Xeon technologies to use Microsoft’s stream of AI breakthroughs on both the cloud and the edge.”

Alces Flight: On Demand HPC now Available in the Azure Marketplace

Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Alces Flight to take advantage of the scalability, reliability and agility of Azure. With Alces Flight, it is possible for researchers to spin up any size of High-Performance Computing cluster in minutes, providing users with a fully-featured HPC environment that includes thousands of open source applications. 

Microsoft to acquire Avere Systems

Over at the Microsoft Blog, Jason Zander writes that the company is acquiring Avere Systems. “By bringing together Avere’s storage expertise with the power of Microsoft’s cloud, customers will benefit from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience.”

Radio Free HPC does their 2018 Technology Predictions

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews their 2017 technology predictions from last year. After that, we do our 2018 Predictions including a bombshell on who Rich thinks will acquire Cray by the end of the year.

Cray Supercomputing Comes to Microsoft Azure

Today Cray announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure. Under the partnership agreement, Microsoft and Cray will jointly engage with customers to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale, seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud.

Intel Joins Open Neural Network Exchange

Jason Knight from Intel writes that the company has joined Microsoft, Facebook, and others to participate in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) project. “By joining the project, we plan to further expand the choices developers have on top of frameworks powered by the Intel Nervana Graph library and deployment through our Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit. Developers should have the freedom to choose the best software and hardware to build their artificial intelligence model and not be locked into one solution based on a framework. Deep learning is better when developers can move models from framework to framework and use the best hardware platform for the job.”

Intel FPGAs Accelerate Microsoft’s Project Brainwave

Today, Intel announced that its AI technology is being used by Microsoft to power their new accelerated deep learning platform, called Project Brainwave. “Project Brainwave achieves a major leap forward in both performance and flexibility for cloud-based serving of deep learning models. We designed the system for real-time AI, which means the system processes requests as fast as it receives them, with ultra-low latency. Real-time AI is becoming increasingly important as cloud infrastructures process live data streams, whether they be search queries, videos, sensor streams, or interactions with users.”

Video: Deep Learning on Azure with GPUs

In this video, you’ll learn how to start submitting deep neural network (DNN) training jobs in Azure by using Azure Batch to schedule the jobs to your GPU compute clusters. “Previously, few people had access to the computing power for these scenarios. With Azure Batch, that power is available to you when you need it.”

Microsoft Acquires Cycle Computing

Today Microsoft announced it has acquired Cycle Computing, a software company focused on making cloud computing resources more readily available for HPC workloads. “Now supporting InfiniBand and accelerated GPU computing, Microsoft Azure looks to be a perfect home for Cycle Computing, which started its journey with software for aggregating compute resources at AWS. The company later added similar capabilities for Azure and Google Cloud.”