GTC is the leading AI and Deep Learning conference in the world, held every year in San Jose, California it brings together start-ups, influencers and leading edge technologies across the industry for a week to see and discuss the latest breakthroughs in self-driving cars, smart cities, healthcare, big data, high performance computing, virtual reality and more.
Supermicro - Facial Recognition
Once again as lead sponsors of GTC, Supermicro had an impressive booth with several live demo's showcasing their latest hardware. One particularly interesting demo was on their SuperServer 1029GQ-TNRT featuring four NVIDIA V100 (PCIe) GPUs. As attendees passed by the stand the software logged their faces and recorded instances of return visitors. Images could be flagged in real time to notify the user if 'persons of interest' returned to the location making it ideal for usage in the security industry. This powerful server features the latest CPU and GPU releases and can be harnessed across a multitude of applications and industries. Also announced were Supermicro’s new scale-up artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) system featuring up to 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. For maximum acceleration of highly parallel applications like artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, self-driving cars, smart cities, health care, big data, HPC, virtual reality and more, the system with next-generation NVIDIA NVLink™ interconnect technology is optimised for maximum performance. The SuperServer 4029GP-TVRT supports eight NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB SXM2 GPU accelerators with maximum GPU-to-GPU bandwidth for cluster and hyper-scale applications. Incorporating the latest NVIDIA NVLink technology with over five times the bandwidth of PCI-E 3.0, this system features independent GPU and CPU thermal zones to ensure uncompromised performance and stability under the most demanding workloads.
SQream - GPU Database
SQream enables data scientists and BI analysts to ask more questions about data from a variety of perspectives by querying raw data directly.
From fast analysis of massive raw data that breezes through trillions of rows of data that provides results up to 100x faster, SQream DB is a GPU SQL database for analytics that harnesses the unique performance of GPUs to handle hundreds of terabytes of data. With thousands of GPU cores, SQream DB accesses up to 1000x more compute per square inch, in a standard server chassis. Particularly interesting was how SQream DB can assist with the analysis of DNA Data by comparing thousands of samples instead of just a handful that replaces the outmoded concept of comparing sequence alignment reads. SQream optimised schemas and parsers enable ingestion of SAM, BAM, VCF and FastQ formats directly into relational tables. Sequence data, alignments directly from SQream DB through any SQL visualiser, like Spotfire, Tableau or Qlik can be visualised.
Mellanox - Accelerating the next generation of DGX
The big announcement from Mellanox at GTC was that the world's first petaflop deep learning system, the NVIDIA DGX-2, features eight Mellanox network adapters supporting EDR InfiniBand and 100Gb Ethernet connectivity to double network performance. The technological advantages of the Mellanox adapters with smart acceleration engines enable the highest performance for AI and Deep Learning applications on the DGX-2 solution. “We are excited to collaborate with NVIDIA and to bring the performance advantages of our EDR InfiniBand and 100 gigabit Ethernet to the new DGX-2 Artificial Intelligence platform,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Doubling the network throughput as compared to previous systems to provide overall bi-directional 1600 gigabit per second data speed enables the DGX-2 platform to analyze growing amounts of data, and to dramatically improve Deep Learning application performance.” ?
Samasource - Workforce Solutions
Samasource employ more than 9,900 people in developing countries like Kenya, Uganda, India and Haiti to annotate self-driving car data with the vision to lift them out of poverty by empowering them with skills and connecting them to dignified digital work. Partnered with four of the top 10 auto companies worldwide they were demonstrating their custom image annotation data sets. As experts in helping computer vision algotithms recognise shapes, patterns, motions and objects within images their annotation services support their machine learning projects to include object detection and recognition, landmarking, attribute annotation, image classification and region extration.