With PowerAI, IBM Will Likely Accelerate Enterprise AI

IBM Watson is now an entire division of the company which indicates the importance they put on the future of AI.

Watson is only one part of IBM’s AI investment which I consider the “easy button” for those enterprise who don’t want to create everything from scratch. IBM also has DIY (do it yourself) infrastructure for cloud providers through POWER8, OpenPOWER, OpenCAPI, designed for cloud giant rolls their own AI software. But what about enterprises who are in the middle, those who want solid infrastructure and want to invest in the latest deep neural network frameworks?  IBM announced an answer this week at SC16 and it’s called PowerAI.

IBM POWER8 and OpenPOWER for DIY public cloud AI

IBM intentionally designed the POWER8 architecture for future workloads like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep neural networks. In 2013, to expand the collaboration of hardware companies in the POWER domain, IBM established the OpenPOWER Foundation which allowed companies to closely collaborate on hardware and software to accelerate future workloads like AI and ML (machine learning). Part of the way that IBM has done that is with CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) and OpenCAPI interconnect for GPU and other forms of accelerators which dramatically improve specific workload performance. IBM’s POWER isn’t justfor AI and ML, as POWER does well in HPC and accelerated databases like Kinetica, but those AI workloads run really well on POWER architecture.

IBM Watson,  the enterprise AI “easy button”

As I said, for enterprises, IBM’s Watson has gotten some traction in certain verticals like healthcare and the “turnkey” solution makes it easier to deploy new ‘smart’ capabilities. However, there are still enterprises that want to develop their own software and might not want to use exactly the software that IBM is offering with Watson. They may want to develop  with a specific deep learning frameworks like CAFFE, TORCH, TensorFlow or Theano. These are big credit card companies and drug research companies with the internal research arms and the budgets to roll their own sophisticated neural-network-based software.

PowerAI for enterprise DIY AI

For those companies, IBM has a new offering called PowerAI. PowerAI is a software toolkit with deep learning frameworks and building block software designed to run on IBM’s highest performing server in its OpenPOWR LC line, the IBM Power S822LC for High Performance Computing, which features NVIDIA NVLink technology optimized for Power and NVIDIA’s latest GPU technology operating at 80 GB per second.