Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence with High-Performance Computing
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to change lives. From fueling medical discoveries to smart collars that can decipher and display the emotions of our household pets, this emerging technology is enabling organisations to innovate. According to IDC[1], by 2025, AI-powered enterprises will see a 100% increase in productivity and new product introduction success rates, higher than those of their non-intelligent peers. By being able to anticipate the market and operational changes with AI, organisations will respond much faster than their competitors. They will be agile enough to adapt to changes in the market and innovate.
Hence, accelerating AI solutions for businesses should be the focus for organizations in India. For example, HPC workloads are becoming more data centric and adding AI technologies to advance the capabilities of traditional HPC modeling and simulation. In the next few years, HPC technologies, such as HPC-enabled machine learning training, will go from experimentation models to production models. As CTOs and CIOs in India look to create an enterprise infrastructure that provides robust performance and scalability for large and highly complex AI models while keeping deployment costs low, the answer may lie in HPC for three key reasons:
- Data analytics: Businesses relying heavily on data analytics generate new insights which improve efficiencies and give them a competitive edge. However, when it comes to analysing large sets of unstructured data that are exponentially increasing in volume and velocity, traditional IT infrastructure is often hamstrung due to slow storage speeds. To adapt to significantly larger data sets and compute-intensive analytics processes, researchers are looking to exascale computing systems, capable of performing one quintillion calculations per second. Powered with HPC, these advanced performance systems are expected to have a profound impact in the faster identification of pandemics, discovery of effective medication and indication of hazardous weather conditions before they happen.
- Acceleration of AI deployments: According to a study[2], in India, almost 70% of organisations are currently investing in Artificial Intelligence to deliver better business results. As HPC and AI continue to converge and evolve to involve more use cases across industries, the possibilities are nearly endless. Organisations are increasingly looking for pre-designed and pre-validated solutions to generate value instead of constructing IT infrastructure. To help companies with roadblocks involved in setting up an AI system, large vendors are also beginning to introduce reference architectures together with HPC infrastructure for data scientists and researchers working. With HPC and software combined, launching new AI applications is becoming easier and faster. Technology vendors are helping data scientists focus less on maintaining AI systems but more on experimenting, exploring and uncovering insights. Organizations do not need to walk their AI journey alone. By collaborating and working with end-to-end technology infrastructure providers, organisations can co-design and customise unique HPC infrastructures to meet AI research, development and AI model deployment needs.
- Growing support for HPC globally and in India: The business benefits of AI are being increasingly recognised, with infrastructure providers now helping the research community and customers capitalise on HPC, expanding it from a niche market to a broader audience. More than ever, customers and partners have access to guidance from technology vendors on how to kick-start their AI initiatives including design, installation, maintenance and most importantly, delivering tangible business outcomes for their organisations. Organisations are focused on promoting open collaboration, bringing together the wide-ranging experience and knowledge of technology developers, service providers and end-users in a worldwide forum that promotes the advancement of innovative, powerful HPC and AI solutions.
[1] The CEO’s Nine Agenda Items for Running a Digital Business – Part 2