The UK Treasury has set aside a budget of £900 million to invest in the development of a supercomputer that would be powerful enough to chew through more than one billion billion simple calculations a second. A new exascale computer would fit the bill, for utilization by newly established advanced AI research bodies. It is speculated that one key goal is to establish a "BritGPT" system. The British government has been keeping tabs on recent breakthroughs in large language models, the most notable example being OpenAI's ChatGPT. Ambitions to match such efforts were revealed in a statement, with the emphasis: "to advance UK sovereign capability in foundation models, including large language models."

The current roster of United Kingdom-based supercomputers looks to be unfit for the task of training complex AI models. In light of being outpaced by drives in other countries to ramp up supercomputer budgets, the UK Government outlined its own future investments: "Because AI needs computing horsepower, I today commit around £900 million of funding, for an exascale supercomputer," said the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt. The government has declared that quantum technologies will receive an investment of £2.5 billion over the next decade. Proponents of the technology have declared that it will supercharge machine learning.

We've created GPT-4, the latest milestone in OpenAI's effort in scaling up deep learning. GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting image and text inputs, emitting text outputs) that, while less capable than humans in many real-world scenarios, exhibits human-level performance on various professional and academic benchmarks. For example, it passes a simulated bar exam with a score around the top 10% of test takers; in contrast, GPT-3.5's score was around the bottom 10%. We've spent 6 months iteratively aligning GPT-4 using lessons from our adversarial testing program as well as ChatGPT, resulting in our best-ever results (though far from perfect) on factuality, steerability, and refusing to go outside of guardrails.

Over the past two years, we rebuilt our entire deep learning stack and, together with Azure, co-designed a supercomputer from the ground up for our workload. A year ago, we trained GPT-3.5 as a first "test run" of the system. We found and fixed some bugs and improved our theoretical foundations. As a result, our GPT-4 training run was (for us at least!) unprecedentedly stable, becoming our first large model whose training performance we were able to accurately predict ahead of time. As we continue to focus on reliable scaling, we aim to hone our methodology to help us predict and prepare for future capabilities increasingly far in advance—something we view as critical for safety.

Whether it's generating a shiny new avatar or putting into words something you couldn't quite figure out on your own, new experiences using generative artificial intelligence are popping up every day. However, "tons of people use AI on Discord" might not be news to you: more than 30 million people already use AI apps on Discord every month. Midjourney's server is the biggest on Discord, with more than 13 million members bringing their imaginations to pixels. Overall, our users have created more than 1 billion unique images through AI apps on Discord. And this is just the start.
Almost 3 million Discord servers include an AI experience, ranging from generating gaming assets to groups writing novels with AI, to AI companions, AI companies and AI-based learning communities. More than 10 percent of new Discord users are joining specifically to access AI interest based communities on our platform.

ASUS today announced that Taiwan Web Services (TWS) has launched its AI 2.0 Foundation Model Consulting Services — a one-stop solution that integrates infrastructure, development environment, and professional technical team services for the development of next-generation AI. TWS is the first company in Taiwan to integrate a BLOOM (BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model) into a supercomputer.

Despite the recent rapid development of large language models (LLM) and generative AI, it is still tough for an enterprise to conduct an LLM project by itself. That is why using the TWS one-stop AI 2.0 Foundation Model Consulting Services is so powerful — it dramatically reduces the barriers to entry and allows enterprises to concentrate more on research and development projects.

Using the new TWS service, enterprises can immediately start building their own generative AI applications while simultaneously reducing their hardware equipment and human capital costs, as well as lowering development risk and time to completion.

IQM Quantum Computers (IQM), the European leader in quantum computers, announced today it has been selected to deliver quantum processing units for the first Spanish quantum computer to be installed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and integrated into the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the most powerful in Spain. "This is another example of our European leadership, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the Spanish quantum ecosystem in collaboration with both public and private institutions. Through our office in Madrid, we are also able to provide the necessary support for this project."

IQM is a member of the consortium led by Spanish companies Qilimanjaro Quantum Tech and GMV that was selected by Quantum Spain, an initiative promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation through the Secretary of State for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA) in December 2022, to build the first quantum computer for public use in Southern Europe.

Ayar Labs, a leader in the use of silicon photonics for chip-to-chip optical connectivity, today announced public demonstration of the industry's first 4 terabit-per-second (Tbps) bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical solution at the upcoming Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) in San Diego on March 5-9, 2023. The company achieves this latest milestone as it works with leading high-volume manufacturing and supply partners including GlobalFoundries, Lumentum, Macom, Sivers Photonics and others to deliver the optical interconnects needed for data-intensive applications. Separately, the company was featured in an announcement with partner Quantifi Photonics on a CW-WDM-compliant test platform for its SuperNova light source, also at OFC.

In-package optical I/O uniquely changes the power and performance trajectories of system design by enabling compute, memory and network silicon to communicate with a fraction of the power and dramatically improved performance, latency and reach versus existing electrical I/O solutions. Delivered in a compact, co-packaged CMOS chiplet, optical I/O becomes foundational to next-generation AI, disaggregated data centers, dense 6G telecommunications systems, phased array sensory systems and more.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, today introduced 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor-based server platforms highlighting built-in accelerators to improve performance across the fastest-growing workloads in AI, analytics, cloud, storage, and HPC.

"Greater availability of new technology like 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors continue to drive the changes in the business landscape", said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit. "The advances in TYAN's new portfolio of server platforms with features such as DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and Compute Express Link 1.1 are bringing high levels of compute power within reach from smaller organizations to data centers."

Intel today marked one of the most important product launches in company history with the unveiling of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids), the Intel Xeon CPU Max Series (code-named Sapphire Rapids HBM) and the Intel Data Center GPU Max Series (code-named Ponte Vecchio), delivering for its customers a leap in data center performance, efficiency, security and new capabilities for AI, the cloud, the network and edge, and the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Working alongside its customers and partners with 4th Gen Xeon, Intel is delivering differentiated solutions and systems at scale to tackle their biggest computing challenges. Intel's unique approach to providing purpose-built, workload-first acceleration and highly optimized software tuned for specific workloads enables the company to deliver the right performance at the right power for optimal overall total cost of ownership. Additionally, as Intel's most sustainable data center processors, 4th Gen Xeon processors deliver customers a range of features for managing power and performance, making the optimal use of CPU resources to help achieve their sustainability goals.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and a MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation subsidiary, brings its upcoming server platforms powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors optimized for HPC and storage markets at SC22 on November 14-17, Booth#2000 in the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas.

"Greater availability of new technology like 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors continue driving the changes in the HPC landscape", said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's Server Infrastructure Business Unit. "The advances in chip technology coupled with the rise in cloud computing has brought high levels of compute power within reach for smaller organizations. HPC now is affordable and accessible to a new generation of users."

IBM Research has published information about the company's latest development of processors for accelerating Artificial Intelligence (AI). The latest IBM processor, called the Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), embraces the problem of creating an enterprise solution for AI deployment that fits in a PCIe slot. The IBM AIU is a half-height PCIe card with a processor powered by 23 Billion transistors manufactured on a 5 nm node (assuming TSMC's). While IBM has not provided many details initially, we know that the AIU uses an AI processor found in the Telum chip, a core of the IBM Z16 mainframe. The AIU uses Telum's AI engine and scales it up to 32 cores and achieve high efficiency.

The company has highlighted two main paths for enterprise AI adoption. The first one is to embrace lower precision and use approximate computing to drop from 32-bit formats to some odd-bit structures that hold a quarter as much precision and still deliver similar result. The other one is, as IBM touts, that "AI chip should be laid out to streamline AI workflows. Because most AI calculations involve matrix and vector multiplication, our chip architecture features a simpler layout than a multi-purpose CPU. The IBM AIU has also been designed to send data directly from one compute engine to the next, creating enormous energy savings."

Taiwan-based leading server manufacturing company Inventec's powerhouse GPU accelerator system, Rhyperior, is everything any modern-day business needs in the digital era, especially those relying heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). A unique and optimal combination of GPUs and CPUs, this 4U GPU accelerator system is based on the NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU and Intel Xeon 3rd Gen (Whitley platform). Rhyperior also equips an NVIDIA NVSwitch to enhance performance dramatically, and its power can be an effective tool for modern workloads.

In a world where technology is disrupting our lives as we know it, GPU acceleration is critical: essentially speeding up processes that would otherwise take much longer. Acceleration boosts execution for complex computational problems that can be broken down into similar, parallel operations. In other words, an excellent accelerator can be a game changer for industries like gaming and healthcare, increasingly relying on the latest technologies like AI and ML for better, more robust solutions for consumers.

AMD today announced it is joining the newly created PyTorch Foundation as a founding member. The foundation, which will be part of the non-profit Linux Foundation, will drive adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tooling by fostering and sustaining an ecosystem of open source projects with PyTorch, the Machine Learning (ML) software framework originally created and fostered by Meta.

As a founding member, AMD joins others in the industry to prioritize the continued growth of PyTorch's vibrant community. Supported by innovations such as the AMD ROCm open software platform, AMD Instinct accelerators, Adaptive SoCs and CPUs, AMD will help the PyTorch Foundation by working to democratize state-of-the-art tools, libraries and other components to make these ML innovations accessible to everyone.

The CXL Consortium, an industry standards body dedicated to advancing Compute Express Link (CXL) technology, today announced the release of the CXL 3.0 specification. The CXL 3.0 specification expands on previous technology generations to increase scalability and to optimize system level flows with advanced switching and fabric capabilities, efficient peer-to-peer communications, and fine-grained resource sharing across multiple compute domains.

"Modern datacenters require heterogenous and composable architectures to support compute intensive workloads for applications such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning - and we continue to evolve CXL technology to meet industry requirements," said Siamak Tavallaei, president, CXL Consortium. "Developed by our dedicated technical workgroup members, the CXL 3.0 specification will enable new usage models in composable disaggregated infrastructure."

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today announced the launch of its X1 controller based solid state drive (SSD) platform that delivers the industry's most advanced enterprise SSD solution. Engineered with Phison's technology to meet the evolving demands of faster and smarter global data-center infrastructures, the X1 SSD platform was designed in partnership with Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions. The X1 SSD customizable platform offers more computing with less energy consumption. With a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks and improves quality of service, the X1 offers more than a 30 percent increase in data reads than existing market competitors for the same power used.

"We combined Seagate's proprietary data management and customer integration capabilities with Phison's cutting-edge technology to create highly customized SSDs that meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise storage market," said Sai Varanasi, senior vice president of product and business marketing at Seagate Technology. "Seagate is excited to partner with Phison on developing advanced SSD technology to provide the industry with increased density, higher performance and power efficiency for all mass capacity storage providers."

Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in high performance artificial intelligence (AI) computing, today announced, for the first time ever, the ability to train models with up to 20 billion parameters on a single CS-2 system - a feat not possible on any other single device. By enabling a single CS-2 to train these models, Cerebras reduces the system engineering time necessary to run large natural language processing (NLP) models from months to minutes. It also eliminates one of the most painful aspects of NLP—namely the partitioning of the model across hundreds or thousands of small graphics processing units (GPU).

"In NLP, bigger models are shown to be more accurate. But traditionally, only a very select few companies had the resources and expertise necessary to do the painstaking work of breaking up these large models and spreading them across hundreds or thousands of graphics processing units," said Andrew Feldman, CEO and Co-Founder of Cerebras Systems. "As a result, only very few companies could train large NLP models - it was too expensive, time-consuming and inaccessible for the rest of the industry. Today we are proud to democratize access to GPT-3 1.3B, GPT-J 6B, GPT-3 13B and GPT-NeoX 20B, enabling the entire AI ecosystem to set up large models in minutes and train them on a single CS-2."

ZOTAC Technology, a global manufacturer of innovation, joins COMPUTEX 2022 with exclusive unveilings at our Virtual Booth for you to discover. From the Metaverse ready wearable PC and professional mini workstation, to the smallest full featured system and ultimate graphics cards, our strong line up of innovative products invites all visitors to re imagine how we create, play and work in the new digital universe.

The next generation ZOTAC VR GO 4.0 brings unprecedented freedom of movement and the most reliable connectivity that no wireless VR device can provide. The all-new VR GO 4.0 Backpack PC is now equipped with more advanced technologies, enabling individual developers and 3D designers to visualize and realize all things creative in Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), or Mixed Reality (MR) for VR content development, virtual entertainment, and more technical scenarios. While for everyone else, the addition of more powerful hardware allows for more visual fidelity and immersive VR experiences.

SMART Modular Technologies, Inc. ("SMART"), a division of SGH and a global leader in memory solutions, solid-state drives, and hybrid storage products, announces its new SMART Kestral PCIe Optane Memory Add-in-Card (AIC), which is able to add up to 2 TB of Optane Memory expansion on a PCIe-Gen4-x16 or PCIe-Gen3-x16 interface independent of the motherboard CPU. SMART's Kestral AICs accelerate selected algorithms by offloading software-defined storage functions from the host CPU to the Intel FPGA on the AIC. SMART's Kestral memory AICs are ideal for hyperscale, data center, and other similar environments that run large memory applications, and would benefit from memory acceleration or system acceleration through computational storage.

"With the advancement of new interconnect standards such as CXL and OpenCAPI, SMART's new family of SMART Kestral AICs addresses the industry's need for a variety of new memory module form factors and interfaces for memory expansion and acceleration," stated Mike Rubino, SMART Modular's vice president of engineering. "SMART is able to leverage our many years of experience in developing and productizing controller-based memory solutions to meet today's emerging and continually evolving memory add-on needs of server and storage system customers."

Super Micro Computer, Inc. (SMCI), a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions, and green computing technology, has announced a revolutionary technology that simplifies large scale GPU deployments and is a future proof design that supports yet to be announced technologies. The Universal GPU server provides the ultimate flexibility in a resource-saving server.

The Universal GPU system architecture combines the latest technologies supporting multiple GPU form factors, CPU choices, storage, and networking options optimized together to deliver uniquely-configured and highly scalable systems. Systems can be optimized for each customer's specific Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Organizations worldwide are demanding new options for their next generation of computing environments, which have the thermal headroom for the next generation of CPUs and GPUs.

Designing Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning hardware accelerators takes effort from hardware engineers in conjunction with scientists working in the AI/ML area itself. A few years ago, we started seeing AI incorporated into parts of electronic design automation (EDA) software tools, helping chip designers speed up the process of creating hardware. What we were "used to" seeing AI do are just a couple of things like placement and routing. And having that automated is a huge deal. However, it looks like the power of AI for chip design is not going to stop there. Researchers at Google and UC Berkeley have made a research project that helps AI design and develop AI-tailored accelerators smaller and faster than anything humans made.

In the published paper, researchers present PRIME - a framework that created AI processors based on a database of blueprints. The PRIME framework feeds off an offline database containing accelerator designs and their corresponding performance metrics (e.g., latency, power, etc.) to design next-generation hardware accelerators. According to Google, PRIME can do so without further hardware simulation and has processors ready for use. As per the paper, PRIME improves performance upon state-of-the-art simulation-driven methods by as much as 1.2x-1.5x. It also reduces the required total simulation time by 93% and 99%, respectively. The framework is also capable of architecting accelerators for unseen applications.

Intel, along with Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE), AMD, Arm, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Corp., Qualcomm Inc., Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., have announced the establishment of an industry consortium to promote an open die-to-die interconnect standard called Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe). Building on its work on the open Advanced Interface Bus (AIB), Intel developed the UCIe standard and donated it to the group of founding members as an open specification that defines the interconnect between chiplets within a package, enabling an open chiplet ecosystem and ubiquitous interconnect at the package level.

"Integrating multiple chiplets in a package to deliver product innovation across market segments is the future of the semiconductor industry and a pillar of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy," said Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Artificial Intelligence Group at Intel. "Critical to this future is an open chiplet ecosystem with key industry partners working together under the UCIe Consortium toward a common goal of transforming the way the industry delivers new products and continues to deliver on the promise of Moore's Law."

UP Bridge the Gap, a brand of AAEON - is pleased to announce a partnership with Hailo, a leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) chipmaker, to meet skyrocketing demands for next-generation AI applications at the edge. The latest UP Bridge the Gap platforms are compatible with Hailo's Hailo-8 M.2 AI Acceleration Module, offering unprecedented AI performance with best-in-class power efficiency.

Edge computing requires increasingly intensive workloads for computer vision and other artificial intelligence tasks, making it increasingly important to move Deep Learning workloads from the cloud to the edge. Running AI applications at the edge ensures real-time inferencing, data privacy, and low latency for smart city, smart retail, Industry 4.0, and many other applications across various markets.

The European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) has launched 3 new research and innovation projects. The projects aim to bring the EU and its partners in the EuroHPC JU closer to developing independent microprocessor and HPC technology and advance a sovereign European HPC ecosystem. The European Processor Initiative (EPI SGA2), The European PILOT and the European Pilot for Exascale (EUPEX) are interlinked projects and an important milestone towards a more autonomous European supply chain for digital technologies and specifically HPC.

With joint investments of €140 million from the European Union (EU) and the EuroHPC JU Participating States, the three projects will carry out research and innovation activities to contribute to the overarching goal of securing European autonomy and sovereignty in HPC components and technologies, especially in anticipation of the European exascale supercomputers.

Optical computing has been the research topic of many startups and tech companies like Intel and IBM, searching for the practical approach to bring a new way of computing. However, the most innovative solutions often come out of startups and today is no exception. According to the report from EETimes, optical computing startup Lightelligence has developed a processor that outperforms regular GPUs by 100 times in calculating some of the most challenging mathematical problems. As the report indicates, the Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE) from Lightelligence manages to outperform regular GPUs, like NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 3080, by almost 100 times in the NP-complete class of problems.

More precisely, the PACE accelerator was tackling the Ising model, an example of a thermodynamic system used for understanding phase transitions, and it achieved some impressive results. Compared to the RTX 3080, it reached 100 times greater speed-up. All of that was performed using 12,000 optical devices integrated onto a circuit and running at 1 GHz frequency. Compared to the purpose-built Toshiba's simulated bifurcation machine based on FPGAs, the PACE still outperforms this system designed to tackle the Ising mathematical computation by 25 times. The PACE chip uses standard silicon photonics integration of Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) for computing and MEMS to change the waveguide shape in the MZI.

QNAP, partnered with ULINK Technology, to launch the DA Drive Analyzer. By leveraging cloud-based AI, this drive failure prediction tool allows users to take proactive steps to protect against server downtime and data loss by replacing drives before they fail. The DA Drive Analyzer leverages statistics generated from ULINK's cloud AI portal. Driven by historical usage data of millions of drives provided by users just like yourself, the DA Drive Analyzer's drive health prediction applies machine learning to track historical behaviors and is able to find drive failure events that won't be flagged by traditional diagnostics tools that rely on S.M.A.R.T. thresholds. Its user interface is also much more friendly and intuitive, allowing you to make plans to replace drives based on clearly defined drive information.

"Artificial Intelligence is a new technology that has tackled many real-life problems. By applying this technology to disk failure prediction, ULINK can actively and continuously monitor drives, detect problems, predict failures, and notify end users with our unique cloud-based data processing system. We are fortunate to have worked with QNAP to create this service, and we believe that many will benefit from it," said Joseph Chen, CEO of ULINK Technology.

AMD today announced a goal to deliver a 30x increase in energy efficiency for AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators in Artificial Intelligence (AI) training and High Performance Computing (HPC) applications running on accelerated compute nodes by 2025.1 Accomplishing this ambitious goal will require AMD to increase the energy efficiency of a compute node at a rate that is more than 2.5x faster than the aggregate industry-wide improvement made during the last five years.

Accelerated compute nodes are the most powerful and advanced computing systems in the world used for scientific research and large-scale supercomputer simulations. They provide the computing capability used by scientists to achieve breakthroughs across many fields including material sciences, climate predictions, genomics, drug discovery and alternative energy. Accelerated nodes are also integral for training AI neural networks that are currently used for activities including speech recognition, language translation and expert recommendation systems, with similar promising uses over the coming decade. The 30x goal would save billions of kilowatt hours of electricity in 2025, reducing the power required for these systems to complete a single calculation by 97% over five years.