Microsoft Is Building AI Supercomputer On Azure Cloud Platform

Grazed from ITechPost. Author: Victor Thomson.

At an event in Dublin, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that the company’s Azure Cloud will become the first artificial intelligence supercomputer. Microsoft explained on the company’s website how its Azure cloud computing offering will bring a new wave of apps based on AI technologies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are defining the next generation applications powered by the cloud. Following this emerging trend, Microsoft is building the first AI supercomputer on its Azure cloud platform.

According to ZDNet, in order to achieve this goal, Microsoft is going beyond the traditional CPU architecture, building cloud processing power based on GPUs. GPUs can be scaled so that banks of GPUs can process tasks in parallel, so they best fitted for dealing with high workloads. The traditional approach of using individual machines with ever faster CPUs is reaching its limits…

Nadella said that GPUs are much better at scale and performance for algorithms used in deep neural nets and machine learning. He also explained that every compute node across all regions of Azure features FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). These FPGAs allow developers to write distribute and run neural network code…

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