OpenPOWER and AI Workshop at BSC, Spain

By Ganesan Narayanasamy

The OpenPOWER and AI workshop hosted by Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Barcelona, Spain was held on June 18th, 2018.

Professor Mateo Valero Crotes, BSC Director, kicked off the program by discussing the importance of IBM and OpenPOWER collaborations to the researchers and executives in attendance. He also mentioned the use of Power9 supercomputers will increase in the future.

Key takeaways from the workshop include:

• researchers can get up and running in a few hours on the DL framework of choice
• all memory in the system is coherent and hence models are not limited to the memory capacity of GPU
• clustering is at 95% efficiency
• data-wrangling is greatly automated
• parameter tuning is monitored by the system
• This is all available in PowerAI platform, of which BSC is setting up 54 nodes

Here, you’ll find five presentations shared at the workshop:

Presentation 1: Introduction and OpenPOWER Academia Discussion Group

Presentation 2: Power9 and PowerAI Features

Presentation 3: Introduction to Snap Machine Learning

Presentation 4: GPU Acceleration in Computational Fluid Dynamics with OpenMP 4.5 and CUDA in OpenPOWER Platforms

Presentation 5: Large Model Support and Distributed Deep Learning Labs