AI Drives the Rise of Accelerated Computing in Data Centers

The recent TPU paper by Google draws a clear conclusion – without accelerated computing, the scale-out of AI is simply not practical. Today’s economy runs in the world’s data centers, and data centers are changing dramatically. Not so long ago, they served up web pages, advertising and video content. Now, they recognize voices, detect images in video streams and connect us with information we need exactly when we need it. Increasingly, those capabilities are enabled by a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. Deep learning is an algorithm that learns from massive amounts of data to create software that can tackle such challenges as translating languages, diagnosing cancer and teaching autonomous cars to drive. The change brought about by AI is accelerating at a pace never seen before in our industry. A pioneering researcher of deep learning, Geoffrey Hinton, told The New Yorker recently, “Take any old classification problem where you have a lot of data, and it’s going to be solved by deep learning. There’s going to be thousands of applications of deep learning.”