PowerAI: An Acceleration Superhighway for AI

While a DIY approach may be a fun way to tackle a home project, it’s not always the best way to get a job done. For example, why go through the complex and labor-intensive process of building a car from all its individual parts before you can enjoy driving it, when you can buy a car off the lot that’s ready to hit the superhighway? That’s the idea behind IBM’s PowerAI software distribution.

What is PowerAI?

Artificial intelligence (AI) requires that a computer be trained to perform a task; this is called machine learning and can be quite a tedious process. Deep learning then begins as the computer reasons and makes decisions on what it learned during training. IBM PowerAI is an enterprise-grade AI software that speeds this process up.

With open-source, deep-learning software/frameworks, PowerAI is optimized for IBM Power Systems servers to offer accelerated learning and insights. To this end, NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) are used as accelerators, coupled with NVIDIA NVLink high-speed GPU interconnect for faster communication between CPUs and GPUs. This architecture, which is exclusive to IBM Power Systems servers, enables faster training times and wide scalability.

Before PowerAI, it could take weeks or months to deploy and optimize open-source frameworks and infrastructure—like building a car from parts. PowerAI slashes deep learning deployment times to just hours, making it as fast and easy as getting into a new car and driving away!

Use Cases for PowerAI

Use cases for PowerAI are many and include fraud detection, customer sentiment, diagnostic image recognition in healthcare, drug discovery, defect detection, real-time analysis of IoT environments, and remote inspection of utility infrastructure.

As an IBM Platinum Business Partner and the largest IBM solution provider in the United States, Sirius offers unmatched expertise in IBM Power solutions. With our combined capabilities and our partnership with NVIDIA, we offer solutions and implementation in various technology areas and excel within the AI and high-performance computing (HPC) space.

Our experts have helped our clients deploy IBM Power HPC/Deep Learning clusters in multiple environments, including academic and medical environments, using both POWER8 and POWER9 systems. We can help you implement fast-learning enterprise AI for the valuable, timely insights your organization needs. Contact us to get driving!

By |2018-12-26T21:41:28-06:00October 25th, 2018|Blog|Comments Off on PowerAI: An Acceleration Superhighway for AI

About the Author:

Niel Balsino is a Senior Power Engineer-Linux with Sirius Computer Solutions.