Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Systems Vendors Refresh Product Lines as Intel Launches New Xeon, Optane Server Technologies
Five of the biggest systems vendors – Dell EMC, Lenovo, Supermicro, Cisco and Cray – in concert with Intel’s launch this morning of its second-generation Xeon Scalable processors (Cascade Lake) and Optane persistent memory – announced the refresh of server portfolios leveraging the new Intel technologies. Here’s a summary of the server companies’ announcements: Dell ... Full article
CIA Said to Prep Multi-Cloud Initiative
A new spy cloud has emerged from the shadows. The CIA is reportedly leading a multibillion procurement effort on behalf of 17 U.S. intelligence agencies dubbed IC Commercial Cloud Enterprise, according to the website FCW. Unlike the contentious and stalled Defense Department cloud procurement, the new intelligence cloud initiative would involve multiple vendors, the website ... Full article
As AI Begets IA, Whither Tomorrow’s Workers?
Deep thinkers pondering the role of automation in the workplace are defining a new domain of appropriate—and controllable—technologies under the rubric of “intelligent automation” that promises to handle rote business processes. Proponents assert the application of IA would change the workplace in a number of important ways—most notably changing data processors into data analyzers—while addressing ... Full article
10 Ways AI Affects HPC in 2019
AI workloads are becoming ubiquitous, including running on the world’s fastest computers — thereby changing what we call HPC forever. As every organization plans for the future, AI workloads are on our minds — how do they affect programming, software needs, hardware demands, and training needs? In the upcoming year, specialists and AI experts will continue ... Full article
Digital Transformation via Modernization: Avoid Rip-and-Replace Disruption
Many believe that 2019 will be a watershed year for digital transformation. There are practical objectives and operational challenges that are forcing executives to rethink previous IT strategies. The primary business driver tends to be variable (e.g., greater business agility through DevOps, operational cost savings through new models like hybrid IT, and improved access, security ... Full article
MIT Researchers Look to Speed Neural Net Design
The design of a neural network architecture remains a daunting problem, requiring human expertise and lots of computing resources. The soaring computational requirements of neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms used in developing neural network frameworks make it difficult to search architectures such as ImageNet. While so-called “diffentiable” NAS can help reduce the cost of GPU ... Full article
Containers Emerge as Deep Learning Tool
Applications containers are now being tuned to specific features that can be incorporated into cloud-native enterprise apps. Amazon Web Services and GPU leader Nvidia are both offering Docker containers geared to deep learning frameworks. For example, AWS unveiled a new tool this week called Deep Learning Containers. The Docker-based images are intended for model training ... Full article
Killing Cloud Latency with Hot Data at the Edge
High latency is an annoyance to consumers, a serious problem to businesses that want to leverage advanced infrastructure services via the cloud and a roadblock to the rollout of advanced IoT-powered capabilities, such as autonomous vehicles. Aversion to high latency is understandable — after all, public cloud storage means the data is likely in a ... Full article
Google Brings in Outside AI Advisors
Growing unease about the arc of AI technology is prompting companies to step back from their breakneck development efforts to consider the ethical implications of AI and how to foster responsible development of future products. The latest is AI leader Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), which this week announced an outside advisory council to consider issues ranging ... Full article
ScaleMatrix Extends Density to the Edge
The edge is anywhere, everywhere (and any size) you want it to be, including some forbidding places that – until the advent of AI and IoT workloads that demand localized processing, storage and low latency – would never have been a locale for IT resources. ScaleMatrix, provider of “variable density” (see below) colo and hybrid ... Full article
Kubernetes Adds Initial Support for Windows Containers
The latest version of the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator moved a step closer to becoming operating-system agnostic with the addition of support for Windows Server-based workloads, reflecting ongoing efforts to expand the application container ecosystem by stabilizing management of Windows containers. Container pioneer Docker, which has worked closely with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) over the past five ... Full article
From ‘Retinator’ to Visionary: AI for Automated Retinopathy Diagnosis
The Iowa Informatics Initiative (UI3) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Symposium was Friday, February 15, 2019 in the University of Iowa (UI) College of Public Health building. UI3 Director Greg Carmichael and UI Associate Dean for Research and Director of the Engineering Initiative for AI Milan Sonka (UI-College of Engineering) welcomed participants. More than 200 informatics professionals ... Full article
Nvidia on the Spot: Answering Autonomous Driving Ethical Questions
We’ve all heard the question: An autonomous car carrying an adult comes around a blind turn and detects a child in the middle of the road. To the left is a cliff, to the right are pedestrians on the sidewalk. The car must make a snap decision. What will, what should, it do? At Nvidia’s ... Full article
GTC 2019: Chief Scientist Bill Dally Gives Glimpse into Nvidia Research Engine
Amid the frenzy of GTC – Nvidia’s annual conference showcasing all things GPU (and now AI) – William Dally, chief scientist and SVP of research, provided a brief but insightful portrait of Nvidia’s research organization. It’s perhaps not gigantic by large company standards, roughly 175 full-time researchers worldwide, but still sizable and quite impactful. At ... Full article
Reemerging Container Security Ills Addressed
Concerns about the security of application containers have reemerged as the micro-services technology spreads across the enterprise. Those worries are fueled by recent reports of a “breakout” vulnerability in the container runtime known as runC. In response, providers of container data services used by DevOps teams are again stressing security features such as isolation of individual ... Full article
Data Science a New Pillar of the Scientific Method – Nvidia
We already knew that GPUs are useful for lots of things besides making Fortnite uncomfortably realistic. All the biggest supercomputers in the world use GPUs to accelerate math, and more recently they’ve been used to power deep neural networks in public clouds. But judging from Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference held this week in San Jose, ... Full article
AI Ecosystem Coalesces Around Hardware Accelerator
The requirement for hardware accelerators used in machine and deep learning applications along with HPC are driving efforts to establish specifications that take account for growing bandwidth and interconnect flexibility needed for emerging AI workloads. With that in mind, the Open Compute Project announced this week that Chinese AI developer Baidu (NASDAQ: BIDU) along with ... Full article
Tabor Communications Announces Rebranding of EnterpriseTech: EnterpriseAI
Tabor Communications, publisher of high performance technology publications HPCwire, Datanami and EnterpriseTech, has announced that EnterpriseTech has been re-branded as EnterpriseAI. The new name reflects the publication’s increased focus on AI in recent years and increased interest in AI, machine learning, deep learning, robotics and other AI-related technologies among enterprise IT strategists. “EnterpriseTech, focused since ... Full article
At GTC: Nvidia Expands Scope of Its AI and Data Center Ecosystem
In the high-stakes race to provide the AI life-cycle solution of choice, three of the biggest horses in the field are IBM, Intel and Nvidia. While the latter is only a fraction of the size of its two bigger rivals, and has been in business for only a fraction of the time, Nvidia continues to ... Full article
AWS Upgrades its GPU-Backed AI Inference Platform
The AI inference market is booming, prompting well-known hyperscaler and Nvidia partner Amazon Web Services to offer a new cloud instance that addresses the growing cost of scaling inference. The new "G4" instances, announced this week, will employ Nvidia’s Tesla T4 GPUs, which are optimized for machine learning inference. Based on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, the ... Full article