Puzzled about this article name OpenPOWERdam? OpenPOWERdam depicts OpenPOWER event held in the dutch capital "Amsterdam".
Luckily, I was privileged to participate and speak for the first time in the OpenPOWER event held in Amsterdam RAI Centre on October 3rd and 4th, 2018. This was my first ever participation in any OpenPOWER event since OpenPOWER organization was founded in 2013.
For those of you are who are not familiar with OpenPOWER, OpenPOWER organization is as an open technical membership organization that enable data centers to rethink their approach to technology. Member companies are enabled to customize POWER CPU processors and system platforms for optimization and innovation for their business needs. These innovations include custom systems for large or warehouse scale data centers, workload acceleration through GPU, FPGA or advanced I/O, platform optimization for SW appliances, or advanced hardware technology exploitation. OpenPOWER members are actively pursuing all of these innovations and more and welcome all parties to join in moving the state of the art of OpenPOWER systems design forward. OpenPOWER Intro Video. Please click here to learn more about OpenPOWER Ready.
I believe that the OpenPOWER Mission Statement summarize it all "“Through the growing open ecosystem of the POWER Architecture and its associated technologies, the OpenPOWER Foundation facilitates its Members to share expertise, investment and intellectual property to serve the evolving needs of all end users.”
I was flabbergasted from the number of active members in this community and of the amount of funding from IBM and participating entities to drive the OpenPOWER organization. Clearly, IBM and all the other members are committed to continuously provide choice to customers.
My eight take-aways from the event are:
1. Industry focused Community:
OpenPOWER community members build technology infrastructures that provide customers with more "choice", allowing them to leverage increased "Data Workloads"and "Analytics"to drive better business outcomes. The innovations introduced by the OpenPOWER community are industry focused. They tend to design and build technology infrastructures that are tailored for specific industries.
2. “What Can Be Automated, Will be Automated"
Cognitive computing, AI, machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) are all current and rapidly evolving technologies. Technologies that are shaping how businesses will operate in the future, and hold promise to improve enteprirses’ efficiency in anything from HR to marketing, data analysis to customer service. OpenPOWER and IBM PowerAI https://www.ibm.com/ae-en/marketplace/deep-learning-platform are key technologies that help accelerate automation across all industries.
3. AI in Life science
OpenPOWER community has a continuous commitment to AI in Life science. In all sessions, demos, Hackathons, etc. you see active members presenting and developing new advancements for AI in life science research. Early disease detection and genomics research tops the community interest. Two AI in life science use cases caught my attention:
A. PES University India located in Bengaluru , presented their successes with AI in healthcare using IBM OpenPOWER in the areas of:
Diabetic Retinopathy diagnosis
Emergency patient care
Early diagnosis of life-threatening illness in children
Diagnosis and managing endemic diseases. e.g. Malaria; chronic diseases (E.g. Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension)
The presented case for "Malaria" detection and characterization could be a game changer in fighting the disease in a large country like India.
B. The AI life science use case developed by "Florin Maniala" a Senior IBM IT Architect who succeeded to develop a an AI case for "Breast cancer" detection using IBM PowerAI Vision". Florin opened the debate in the room to the question of "Can We accelerate diagnostic process with Deep Learning?"
4. Snap ML
"Snap Machine Learning" also called "Snap ML" is a Library that provides high-speed training of popular machine learning models on modern CPU/GPU computing systems. The three main features that distinguish Snap ML are:
Distributed training
GPU acceleration
Sparse data structures
Snap ML has been developed by by IBM research labs in Zurich, Switzerland. We were lucky to learn about Snap ML from "Andreea Anghel, Ph.D" one of the key developers and contributors to this project.
Snap ML system description could be illustrated with following illustration:
5. IBM Deep Learning Impact (DLI)
I had the opportunity to present many of IBM Spectrum Computing technologies to the participating community members. One of these technology is the IBM Deep Learning Impact (DLI) is a great tool for customers who have massively invested in GPU. IBM Spectrum Conductor Deep Learning Impact leverages the power of GPUs to provide an engine that supports distributed deep learning across multiple GPUs and multiple hosts; efficiently scaling out on an IBM Spectrum Conductor with Spark cluster.
6. IBM Spectrum MPI
Another Spectrum Computing technology that I presented within the event is IBM® Spectrum MPI; which is a high-performance, production-quality implementation of Message Passing Interface (MPI). It accelerates application performance in distributed computing environments. It provides a familiar portable interface based on the open-source MPI. It goes beyond Open MPI and adds some unique features of its own, such as advanced CPU affinity features, dynamic selection of interface libraries, superior workload manager integration and better performance. IBM Spectrum MPI supports a broad range of industry-standard platforms, interconnects and operating systems, helping to ensure that parallel applications can run almost anywhere. There are Four good reasons to use IBM Spectrum MPI:
Get results faster with better infrastructure management
Achieve better network connectivity and more
Gain improved performance and flexibility
Attain greater speed
7. #AI4Good Hackathon and Bengaluru
I participated as an observer in an AI life science Hackathon #AI4Good during the event between groups of competing students. The participating students demonstrated a level of enthusiasm, knowledge, adoption of technologies of the future and creativity that earned them the admiration and respect of all attendees.
What was noticed during the Hackathon was the number of participating students from Bengaluru universities. Students that are paying from their own pockets to travel for many hours to Europe to compete in Hackathons and learn about latest technologies and innovations from vendors and professors participating in the OpenPOWER event. There is definitely something admirable be analyzed about the rise of such talented students from one City in India; "Chapeau bas". Is Bengaluru becoming the Stanford? MIT? CalTech? Harvard? Princeton? of the east.
8. Collaboration with distinguished professors
One of the most interesting observations during the event was the massive participation of University professors in the OpenPOWER event. The professors were actively presenting, participating in panels, lead hackathon and participated in group and individual Q&As. It seems that this tight link between the OpenPOWER community members and distinguished university professors is a key success factor of this community. I was honored to learn and speak with Dr. Antonio Liotta , Professor of Data Science and Director of Data Science Centre at University of Derby who made a very interesting presentation about AI in the IOT era.
I also attended Dr. Praveen Kumar B.A; M.B.B.S., M.D., (PGDBE), MIPHA, MIAPSM; Epidomeiologist & Professor, Department of community Medicine; who made another very interesting presentation about AI in life science focusing on the use of AI in the diagnosis and management of endemic diseases. e.g. Malaria; chronic diseases (e.g. Diabetes Mellitus, Hypertension).
Finally, every community needs a quarter back to continuously evolve and keep growing. The OpenPOWER community quarter back is Ganesan Narayanasamy who works for IBM in the capacity of "OpenPOWER leader in Education and Research". Ganesan continuously demonstrates unparalleled energy, enthusiasm, ability to engage his contacts to support the community and clearly has exceptional communication skills to drive this community to continuous success. Braov Ganesan.
Holding the OpenPOWER event in the city for arts grand masters like Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Vermeer as well as the modern heavy hitters of photography, design and architecture; was a wise choice by the event organizers. Clearly, the organizers wanted to extend the city inspiration to the OpenPOWER community members, designers and architects to come up with new innovations that can evolve and impact industries.
#AI #CognitiveComputing #DataScience #ML #MachineLearning #DL #DeepLearning #SnapML #DLI #HPC #HPDA #Analytics #BDA #BigData #WorkloadAutomation #IBMSpectrum #SpectrumComputing #Storage #AI4Good @ibmhpc @IBMSDI.
