Author Archives: Oliver Peckham

Oliver Peckham

Intel Invests €33B in Europe’s Semiconductor Supply Chain

March 16th, 2022 (0)

Intel has announced that it is making an “initial” €33 billion (~$36 billion) investment across the semiconductor value chain in Europe. The investment — which spans R&D, manufacturing and packaging — comes at a time when sovereignty is, more ...

Nvidia Acquires Software-Defined Storage Provider Excelero

March 8th, 2022 (0)

Nvidia has announced that it has acquired Excelero. The high-performance block storage provider, founded in 2014, will have its technology integrated into Nvidia’s enterprise software stack. Nvidia is not disclosing the value of the deal. Excelero’s core product, Excelero ...

Graphcore Announces Wafer-on-Wafer IPU, ‘Good’ Computer

March 4th, 2022 (0)

Graphcore introduced its AI-focused, PCIe-based Intelligent Processing Units (IPUs) six years ago. Since then, the company has done anything but slow down, announcing a second generation of IPUs in 2020 and, over the years, larger and larger IPU-based “IPU-POD” ...

Sony’s ‘Sophy’ AI, Trained on Thousands of Races, Bests Humans Champs

February 11th, 2022 (0)

AI is a critical element of many modern video games, enabling non-player allies and opponents to intelligently move and act in response to player actions. But as games have become more complex—incorporating increasingly true-to-life physics, intricate game mechanics, and ...

Facebook Parent Company Meta Builds Massive AI Supercomputer

January 24th, 2022 (0)

Fresh off its rebrand last October, Meta (née Facebook) is putting muscle behind its vision of a metaversal future with a massive new AI supercomputer called the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC). Meta says that, at full capacity, RSC will deliver ...

At SC21, Focusing On the Ethics of Mainstreamed HPC

November 19th, 2021 (0)

As the panelists gathered onstage for SC21’s first plenary talk, the words of the so-called Peter Parker principle – “with great power comes great responsibility” – cycled across the background slideshow. For the following hour, five panelists confronted this dilemma: ...

AWS Making Its Gaudi-Powered, ML-Optimized EC2 DL1 Instances Generally Available

October 27th, 2021 (0)

As machine learning becomes a dominating use case for local and cloud computing, companies are racing to provide services that optimized and accelerated for AI applications. Now, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is introducing a new competitor to the landscape: ...

Graphcore Unveils Its Latest and Largest Commercially-Available IPU Pods

October 25th, 2021 (0)

After launching its second-generation intelligence processing units (IPUs) in 2020, four years after emerging from stealth, Graphcore is now boosting its product line with its largest commercially-available IPU-based systems: the IPU-POD128 and the IPU-POD256. The newly announced IPU-POD128 has ...

Hurricane Intensity Predictions Getting Help From AI

October 11th, 2021 (0)

AI techniques to better predict hurricane intensity compared to the most widely used existing U.S. hurricane models are being deployed by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to give affected residents better information about preparing or evacuating ...

Experts Grapple with AI’s Environmental Costs

September 17th, 2021 (0)

AI algorithms have made tremendous progress in making many computational processes more efficient, but “efficiency” isn’t always the name of the game for the AI industry itself. Famously, a team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst concluded ...