Q&A on PowerAI

For research I took a look at the PowerAI offering.  See the complete article:

Putting the “AI” in PowerAI
A Q&A with IBM Research’s Hillery Hunter

IBM’s latest Power servers come with an AI twist. Optimized for deep learning, a new so-called PowerAI toolkit will “help train the systems to think and learn in a more human-like way, at a faster pace,” as announced at SC16, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis.

I spoke with Hillery Hunter, IBM Research’s director of Systems Acceleration and Memory and Memory Strategist, about her team’s contribution to the software behind the world’s fastest deep learning servers.

How was the AI added, and what does that mean for how a Power system functions?
 Today’s launch represents our first public offering in hardware-software co-optimization for deep learning. Researchers have worked closely with IBM’s systems engineers to create code that is optimized to the Power S822LC (IBM’s highest-performing OpenPOWER server).

We used the S822LC’s unique design – including high-bandwidth NVLink interconnect, not just between pairs of GPUs, but also between the GPUs and the CPUs – to deliver higher deep learning training performance.

This means that the co-designed PowerAI hardware and software can build learned models from images, speech, or other media in less time than prior generations of hardware and software. Deep learning training time is a key metric for developer productivity in this domain. It enables innovation at a faster pace, as developers can invent and try out many new models, parameter settings, and data sets.    .... "