The Pope weighs in on AI, Amazon Web Services rolls out instances based on next-gen GPUs, software and tools make access to quantum computing easier, and more.
Keeping pace with news and developments in the real-time analytics market can be a daunting task. We want to help by providing a summary of some of the items our staff came across each week. Here is a short list of some news from this week:
Pope Francis in his monthly prayer intention weighed in on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), again. In a video message for November, the Pope emphasized that progress in these fields must be oriented “towards respecting the dignity of the person and of Creation.” This gives new meaning to what we in the industry mean when we talk about ethical AI or responsible AI.
He further said: “We pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind.” This is not the first time the Pope has addressed AI issues. Earlier this year, executives from IBM and Microsoft joined the Pontiff in a summit on human-centered ways of designing AI. The outcome was the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a document developed to support an ethical approach to AI and promote a sense of responsibility among organizations, governments, and institutions with the aim to create a future in which digital innovation and technological progress serve human genius and creativity and not their gradual replacement.
Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P4d instances, the next generation of GPU-powered instances delivering 3x faster performance, up to 60% lower cost, and 2.5x more GPU memory for machine learning training and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads when compared to previous generation P3 instances. P4d instances feature eight NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs and 400 Gbps of network bandwidth (16x more than P3 instances). Using P4d instances with AWS’s Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and NVIDIA GPUDirect RDMA (remote direct memory access), customers can create P4d instances with EC2 UltraClusters capability. With EC2 UltraClusters, customers can scale P4d instances to over 4,000 A100 GPUs (2x as many as any other cloud provider) by making use of AWS-designed non-blocking petabit-scale networking infrastructure integrated with Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage, offering on-demand access to supercomputing-class performance to accelerate machine learning training and HPC.
Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI), a provider of quantum-ready applications and tools, now offers simplified access to the new D-Wave System Advantage quantum computer (QC) via its Mukai quantum software development and execution platform. D-Wave Advantage has more than doubled the qubit count over its predecessor, the 2000Q, to more than 5,000 qubits, and provides 2.5 times more connectivity between qubits. Advantage’s greater connectivity among twice the number of qubits is expected to allow the execution of larger and more complex quantum computer programs. As quantum computer makers like D-Wave continue to introduce more capable hardware, it increases the need for software that enables users to harness the greater power. Mukai provides easy-to-use tools to access such expanded capability, enabling government agencies or businesses to solve larger-scale, mission-critical problems while reaping the benefits of increasingly more powerful computers.
Brainome, the company behind a measure-before-build tool for machine learning, launched Daimensions. By introducing measurement as a structured discipline to the field, Brainome offers faster, more effective data preparation, rapid training and execution of models, compact model size, quick identification of most predictive data attributes, and explainability of results. Traditional approaches to machine learning operate in a default “more is better” framework. As a result, data science and machine learning teams expend great resources and money on data preparation and compute power. They get bogged down by model complexity, size, and opacity, resulting in limited business output and often disappointing return-on-investment. Brainome takes a fundamentally different approach: measuring information content in data against target types of models before building anything. Brainome’s approach steers teams towards better outcomes, making it possible to predict project speed, costs, and ultimately success. Although it can be used in any field on any data, the power of Daimensions’ core benefits have been demonstrated for industries such as genomics research, FinTech, HealthTech, and AdTech.
Splice Machine, which offers a scale-out SQL database with built-in machine learning, announced Livewire, its new open-source Operational AI platform for industrial IoT use cases. Livewire combines data and an AI platform to alert plant operators of likely outages or performance degradation soon enough for them to take remedial action to avoid outages and improve performance. The new product was developed with industrial partners and customers – many of whom provided input on what was missing in their existing stack. The platform brings together the three components needed in a comprehensive AI solution for industrial IoT in a single, open-source offering. They include connectivity and ingestion, an observability platform, and a prediction platform.
Rockwell Automation announced a set of new capabilities for FactoryTalk InnovationSuite, powered by PTC to simplify, scale, and accelerate digital transformation for industrial organizations. This news follows the recent announcement that the two companies are extending and expanding the scope of their strategic alliance. FactoryTalk InnovationSuite is a comprehensive digital transformation software suite that offers fully integrated industrial internet of things (IIoT), edge-to-cloud analytics, manufacturing execution system (MES), and augmented reality (AR) capabilities – required for the connected enterprise. InnovationSuite makes it simple to rapidly develop, operationalize, and ultimately scale innovative solutions to operations globally.
SimpleMachines, Inc. (SMI), which includes leading research scientists and industry veterans formerly of Qualcomm, Intel, and Sun Microsystems, has created an easily programmable, high-performance chip that will accelerate a wide variety of AI and machine-learning applications. The chip, Mozart, is a TSMC 16-nanometer design that utilizes HBM2 memory. The chip’s software interface includes direct TensorFlow support as well as APIs for C/C++ and Python. Future generations of the chip will leverage its unique architecture to scale up and down the power spectrum from enterprise-class high-performance systems to 5-watt IoT devices. Mozart will be available via a PCIe card called Accelerando, or via the Symphony Cloud Service (SMI’s hosted cloud service with easy access to public clouds like Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS). Initial results have shown significant speedups across a broad set of AI applications. Examples include recommendation engines, speech and language processing, and image detection, all of which can run simultaneously.
Infoworks.io, a provider of Enterprise Data Operations and Orchestration (EDO2) systems, announced the availability of Infoworks DataFoundry for Databricks in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services. Infoworks DataFoundry allows enterprises to easily and rapidly onboard, prepare, and operationalize data while dramatically reducing the time and skill level needed to launch analytics use cases. It also automates data operations and data orchestration for developing and managing data workflows in hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
Exxact Corporation expanded its portfolio of high-end storage adding solutions from DDN. By partnering with DDN, Exxact can offer high-performance storage solutions for end-to-end data management, from data creation and persistent storage to active archives and the cloud. Specifically, Exxact will offer multiple DDN Storage Solutions, including all-flash solutions (DDN SFA200NVX and SFA400NVX), scale-up and scale-out hybrid flash storage appliance (DDN SFA7990X), and DDN’s flagship appliance (DDN SFA18KX).
Moogsoft announced the Moogsoft Observability Cloud, which extends AI-based intelligence to observability data. It turns metric and event data into actionable insights by automating anomaly detection, surfacing important alerts, and correlating everything together. The solution and its insights provide teams better visibility about services, advanced warning of potential outages, and context about the incidents that cause them. Using this information, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams can more efficiently collaborate, learn, improve, and innovate their services.
Firstsource Solutions Limited, a global provider of Business Process Management (BPM) services and a RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group company, announced a strategic partnership with Uniphore, a provider of Conversational Service Automation (CSA), to use its platform in Firstsource’s Digitally Empowered Contact Center (DECC). The agreement brings together Firstsource and Uniphore global expertise, deep domain experience, and cutting-edge technology to deliver enhanced Customer Experiences (CX). By using the combined efficiency and advanced capabilities of the Firstsource – Uniphore partnership, there are multiple benefits for businesses, including reduced costs and higher customer satisfaction.
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In case you missed it, here are our most recent previous weekly real-time analytics news roundups:
