IBM Eyes Enterprise Workloads With PowerAI 

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Last year at SC15, IBM offered its vision of an accelerator-assisted computing paradigm enabled by the OpenPOWER ecosystem of diverse partners and focused on cognitive computing as the key application driver. Since then, Big Blue has been busily productizing the vision and today announced PowerAI, a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools optimized for IBM’s high-end server (S822LC for HPC) that features the new Power8+ chip with NVIDIA’s NVLink, and is one of very few systems – perhaps the only – shipping with NVIDIA’s Pascal P100 GPU.

Like others, IBM’s view of HPC is taking a distinct AI and enterprise slant. “People say HPC but they really mean two things, the workload and the infrastructure. We are seeing the traditional scientific computing workloads, but we are also seeing other workloads show up, particular in the enterprise. These are driving the next generation of HPC infrastructure, things like accelerated databases, machine learning and deep learning. That’s essentially saying the same infrastructure we’re using for advanced scale computing is now being used for AI and advanced analytics,” said Sumit Gupta, IBM's vice president of high performance and analytics.

SC, of course, is a shotgun of product and technology announcements and interestingly Intel is expected to announced its own AI productizing efforts and plans later in the week. Both industry heavyweights seem to believe the era of AI, writ large, has arrived. IBM, of course has been delivering that message strongly for a while with IBM Watson being the most visible expression. PowerAI, developed with NVIDIA, just the latest milestone in the IBM AI roadmap.

Read the full story at sister website HPCWire.