by Angela Guess
Rob Farber of TechEnablement recently wrote in InsideHPC, “Intel provided a wealth of machine learning announcements following the Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor (formerly known as Knights Landing) announcement at ISC’16. Building upon the various technologies in Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF), the machine learning community can expect up to 38% better scaling over GPU-accelerated machine learning and an up to 50x speedup when using 128 Intel Xeon Phi nodes compared to a single Intel Xeon Phi node. The company also announced an up to 30x improvement in inference performance (also known as scoring or prediction) on the Intel® Xeon E5 product family due to an optimized Intel Caffe plus Intel® Math Kernel Library (Intel® MKL) package. This is particularly important as Intel notes the Intel Xeon E5 processor family is the most widely deployed processor for machine learning inference in the world.”
Farber goes on, “Reflecting Intel’s very strong commitment to open source, the CPU optimized MKL-DNN library for machine learning has been open sourced. Rounding out a cornucopia of machine learning technology announcements, the company has created a single portal for all their machine learning efforts at http://intel.com/machinelearning. Through this portal, Intel hopes to train 100,000 developers in the benefits of their machine learning technology. They are backing this up by giving early access to their machine learning technology to top research academics. Interest in machine learning is accelerating as commercial and scientific organizations are realizing the tremendous impact it can have across a wide range of markets ranging from Internet search, to social media, to real-time robotics, self-driving vehicles, drones and more.”
Photo credit: Intel