The document discusses IBM's Power Systems as an expert platform for artificial intelligence. Some key points: - Power Systems are designed for modern AI workloads, with accelerated computing capabilities like GPUs and FPGAs. - The IBM Power AC922 server provides an "acceleration superhighway" between CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators for optimal AI performance. - Tests show the AC922 can reduce AI model training times by 3.8x compared to x86 systems, thanks to features like high bandwidth NVLink connections between components. - IBM's PowerAI software tools help make AI development easier on the Power platform.

1. THE PLATFORM FOR AI
Jesper Bergh
Client Technical Specialist - IBM

2. Growth of data and data sources
Increased focus on data science
Accelerated computing
THE AI ERA IS HERE

3. Data
Tools and creativity to improve your business
Performance “.”
THE NEED

4. Data
THE NEED

5. DATA
AI
Oracle
SQL srv
Db2
…
EDB
MongoDB
MariaDB
…
Hadoop
Spark
Hortonworks
Kinetica
BlazeGraph
…

6. Performance “.”
THE NEED

7. The best server for enterprise AI
IBM Power Systems AC922

8. “POWER9 is an absolute beast when it comes to
moving data, a critical for AI-centric processes.”
– Charles King
President and principal analyst, Pund-IT Inc
“IBM’s POWER9 is literally the Swiss Army knife of ML
acceleration as it supports an astronomical amount of IO and
bandwidth, 10X of anything that’s out there today.”
– Patrick Moorhead
Principal analyst, Moor Insights & Strategy
“Google is excited about IBM's progress in the
development of the latest Power technology”
– Bart Sano
VP of Google Platforms
”IBM Power is a great
cognitive platform if
not the best out there”

9. Accelerated Computing
Heterogeneous Computing
9
Graphic
Processors
NVIDIA Volta
FPGA
Xilinx
Memory
options
Flash
PCM
…
AC

10. AC922
An acceleration superhighway
Unleash accelerated computing potential in the
post CPU-only era
Designed for the AI era
Architected for the modern analytics and
AI workloads that fuel insights
Delivering enterprise-class AI
Cutting-edge AI innovation data scientists desire,
with dependability IT requires

11. Extreme CPU/Accelerator BandwidthSystem
bottleneck
Only Available with POWER
Acceleration Superhighway

12. Tools and creativity to improve your business
THE NEED

13. ENTERPRISE-ready
software DISTRIBUTION
built on open source
TOOLS for ease
of development
PERFORMANCE
faster training times
for data scientists
IBM PowerAI

14. PowerAI package & tools
Democratization of the AI
Power System AC922 server
Nvlink NVIDIA GPUTensorFlow
CAFFE
Theano
Chainer
Torch
(DL4J)
DIGITS,
OpenBLAS,…
PowerAI DL Insight
SpectrumConductor
PowerAI Vision
POWER9
Power System AC922 server
Nvlink NVIDIA GPU
TensorFlow
CAFFE
Theano
Chainer
Torch
(DL4J)
DIGITS,
OpenBLAS,…
PowerAI DL Insight
SpectrumConductor
PowerAI Vision
POWER9
Power System AC922 server
Nvlink NVIDIA GPU
TensorFlow
CAFFE
Theano
Chainer
Torch
(DL4J)
DIGITS,
OpenBLAS,…
PowerAI DL Insight
SpectrumConductor
PowerAI Vision
POWER9Power System AC922 server
Nvlink NVIDIA GPU
TensorFlow
CAFFE
Theano
Chainer
Torch
(DL4J)
DIGITS,
OpenBLAS,…
PowerAI DL Insight
SpectrumConductor
PowerAI Vision
POWER9
Data Scientist Experience (DSX)

15. Maximize research productivity running training for
medical/satellite images with Caffe with the AC922
• 3.8X reduction vs tested x86 systems 1000 iterations running
on competing systems to train on 2k x 2k images
• Critical machine learning (ML) capabilities such as regression,
nearest neighbor, recommendation systems, clustering, etc.
operate on more than just the GPU memory
• NVLink 2.0 enables enhanced Host to GPU communication
• Large Model Support - use system memory and GPU memory
to support more complex and higher resolution data
3.8X reduction in AI model training
vs tested x86 systems
Results are based IBM Internal Measurements running 1000 iterations of Enlarged GoogleNet model (mini-batch size=5) on Enlarged Imagenet Dataset (2240x2240) .
Power AC922; 40 cores (2 x 20c chips), POWER9 with NVLink 2.0; 2.25 GHz, 1024 GB memory, 4xTesla V100 GPU ; Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for Power Little Endian
(POWER9) with CUDA 9.1/ CUDNN 7;. Competitive stack: 2x Xeon E5-2640 v4; 20 cores (2 x 10c chips) / 40 threads; Intel Xeon E5-2640 v4; 2.4 GHz; 1024 GB memory,
4xTesla V100 GPU, Ubuntu 16.04. with CUDA .9.0/ CUDNN 7 .
Software: IBM Caffe with LMS Source code https://github.com/ibmsoe/caffe/tree/master-lms
Caffe: More Accuracy
(3.8 iterations vs 1)
4 run
Accuracy
3 run
Accuracy
2 run
Accuracy
1 run
Accuracy
One
Iteration
One
Iteration
Two
Iterations
Three
Iterations
+ 80%
iteration
Xeon
4xV100
AC922
4xV100

16. POWER9

17. Threads per
core vs x86
Up to 9.5x more I/O
bandwidth than x86
More RAM
possible vs. x86
CPU to deliver
PCIe gen 4
4x 9.5x 2.6x 1st
POWER9
An acceleration superhighway.
The only processor specifically designed for the AI era.

18. Summit
AI at unrivaled scale
Feature Titan Summit
Application
Performance
Baseline 5-10x Titan
Number of Nodes 18.688 ~4.600
Node performance 1,4 TF > 40 TF
Total performance 27.122 TF ~200.000 TF
Total System Memory 710 TB
>10 PB DDR4 + HBM2 + Non-
volatile
Processors
1 AMD Opteron™
1 NVIDIA Kepler™
2 IBM POWER9™
6 NVIDIA Volta™
File System 32 PB, 1 TB/s, Lustre®
250 PB, 2,5 TB/s, GPFS™
Peak power
consumption
9 MW 15 MW

19. POWER9 Family
2018
 More performance and scale via
POWER9 processors
 More memory capacity for
in-memory DB
 Reduce latency and improve
throughput with enhanced I/O
support
• PCIe Gen4
• Integrated NVMe Flash (bootable)
 High-bandwidth (25Gb/s) links for
GPU/OpenCAPI acceleration
2-socket
Entry
4-socket
Midrange
4- to16-socket
Modular High-end
Large-scale multi-socket SMP
Buffered memory attach
Robust 2-socket SMP
Direct memory attach
2017
AC922
2-socket
Linux
Scale Out 2-socket SMP
Direct memory attach

21. QUESTIONS?

22. THANK YOU