Press releases feed

Credera launches global cross-functional AI council

Rob Roe — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 13:20:33 +0000

Credit: Vasin Lee/Shutterstock

Credera, Omnicom's global boutique consulting firm, founds a global artificial intelligence (AI) council to create unique insights to help shape the future landscape of AI across the vast breadth of opportunities and challenges.

This diverse group is comprised of leading professors, C-level executives, and legal scholars including JoAnne Stonier, Chief Data Officer at MasterCard, Trisha Meyer, Professor of Digital Governance at the Brussels School of Governance, Cecilia Dones, Assistant Professor at Columbia University, retired Federal Patent Judge Adam Floyd, and many others.

Credera's Chief Data Scientist Vincent Yates, whose experience in AI includes time as the Head of Data Science at Uber, Director of Analytics Engineering at Zillow Group, and Chief Data Scientist at GE Digital, founded the group on the belief that AI is shifting the paradigm just as mobile and the internet have before.

"We have people with unique backgrounds and training to meet the needs of this new paradigm and shape the resulting landscape," says Vincent Yates. "This dynamic and talented group will tackle some of the biggest questions around AI ranging from innovation, ethics, regulation, security, talent, and technology."

The launch of the global AI council is a part of Credera's expansion of its AI solutions to accelerate business and marketing transformation for its clients, and more broadly within Omnicom Group.

Credera's deep AI consulting offerings and experience leading global clients in automotive, pharmaceutical, financial services, and the public sector enable Omnicom's powerful, first-mover partnerships with Google, AWS, and Adobe to help clients transform. The recent breakthrough in AI is as important as the introduction of the internet and mobile communications. In the same way that Credera helped its clients to capitalise from these paradigm shifts, we are helping clients to find the right solutions to this new fundamental transformation in how organisations function.

"We are committed to continued excellence through AI with our global, boutique approach," says Credera's global CEO Justin Bell. "We tailor each solution to the specific client needs while also facing each challenge with the expertise and holistic thinking of a full-service, global consulting firm."

"We are already seeing our clients transform how they serve their customers and society through AI. At the same time, it's important to have the right data, cloud, and governance foundations to achieve the full potential of the technology," says Marius Rubin, Chief Technology Officer for Credera UK.

By taking this unique approach, Credera helped clients like a global pharmaceutical company that shifted to direct-to-consumer marketing with Credera's Marketing Analytics Platform (MAP) powered by AI and realized a 30% increase in return on investment and a 46% increase in efficiency. Credera also led a large national lender to a 219% increase in their profits/earnings ratio by implementing an ML-driven platform to scale their business.

Additional commitments to AI transformation include Credera's investments to train and upskill its global boutique workforce in AI, making it the core foundation of its consulting practices and offerings. Credera's rapidly expanding AI capabilities will meet client demand for AI expertise as industries transform.

Thought leadership, methodologies, and other guidance from Credera about the rapidly transforming AI landscape can be found at on Credera's website.

News releases

Credera

Digital Transformation

Partner Program supports organisations requiring powerful processing capabilities

Rob Roe — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 17:28:29 +0000

Credit: Timofeev Vladimir/Shutterstock

CIQ has announced the launch of its CIQ Partner Program. The launch reinforces CIQ’s partner-first channel strategy as the company aims to deliver its suite of solutions and services to organisations worldwide that desire stability, seamless compatibility and cost-effectiveness for their IT infrastructure and high-performance computing needs.

The CIQ Partner Program is ideal for resellers and integrators selling to enterprises and government organisations of all sizes that are deploying and managing infrastructure at scale, data-intensive workloads for product development, scientific research, modeling, machine learning and AI.

Today, CIQ has 35 partners with more being added everyday. The latest organisations to join the CIQ Partner Program include Penguin Computing, an HPC original equipment manufacturer (OEM) that helps enterprises successfully navigate the adoption of emerging technologies in HPC and AI, as well as Zenlayer, an edge cloud service company with over 290 sites globally, offering bare metal compute, with expertise in fast-growing emerging markets. To see the complete list, please visit the Partner Program page of the CIQ website.

“Collaborations fuel ecosystems, and such ecosystems drive evolution,” said Arthur Tyde, senior vice president of business development at CIQ. “With our newly launched CIQ Partner Program, we provide an avenue for our partners specialising in cloud, integration and channel services to deliver robust, secure and adaptable enterprise solutions to their customers. We want all of our partners to be in the Linux distribution business.”

Benefits of the CIQ Partner Program

CIQ is committed to providing its partners with disruptive, industry-leading technology, integrated solutions, and sales and marketing support.

CIQ Partner Program benefits include the following:

Deal registration
Sales team training
Partner directory listing
Lead sharing
CIQ joint solution briefs
Marketing opportunities

CIQ partners are empowered to utilise trusted open source tools to solve their customers’ challenges with confidence, knowing the history of Linux and HPC expertise at CIQ. Additionally, CIQ partners are encouraged to disrupt the status quo of traditional enterprise Linux licenses. Our industry-changing “by the person” support model allows CIQ partners and customers to have current and scaling infrastructure conversations without having to stop and count licenses for machines. CIQ lowers the cost of entry for production-ready, stable, secure and automated full stack deployments, and we want our partners to be right by our side with every engagement.

Supercomputing provider introduces 32-GPU single-node for AI and accelerated computing

Rob Roe — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:45:28 +0000

GigaIO, a provider of workload-defined infrastructure for AI and technical computing, has announced that it successfully configured 32 AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators to a single-node server utilising the company’s transformative FabreX ultra-low latency PCIe memory fabric. Available today, the 32-GPU engineered solution, called SuperNODE, offers a simplified system capable of scaling multiple accelerator technologies such as GPUs and FPGAs without the latency, cost, and power overhead required for multi-CPU systems.

As large language model applications demand even more GPU performance, technologies that reduce the number of required node-to-accelerator data communications are crucial to providing necessary compute power at improved infrastructure TCO.

“As AI workloads become more broadly adopted, systems that offer the ability to harness the compute power of multiple GPUs and better manage data saturation at ultra-low latency are essential,” said Mark Nossokoff, Research Director, Hyperion Research. “And as large language model applications drive demand for more GPU performance, technologies that work to minimize node-to-accelerator traffic are better positioned to provide the necessary performance for a robust AI infrastructure.”

“AMD collaborates with startup innovators like GigaIO in order to bring unique solutions to the evolving workload demands of AI and HPC,” said Andrew Dieckmann, corporate vice president and general manager, Data Center and Accelerated Processing, AMD. “The SuperNODE system created by GigaIO and powered by AMD Instinct accelerators offers compelling TCO for both traditional HPC and generative AI workloads.”

GigaIO’s SuperNODE system was tested with 32 AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators on a Supermicro 1U server powered by dual 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors.
● Hashcat: Workloads that utilize GPUs independently, such as HashCat, scale perfectly linearly all the way to the 32 GPUs tested.
● Resnet50: For workloads that utilize GPU Direct RDMA or peer-to-peer, such as Resnet50, the scale factor is slightly reduced as the GPU count rises. There is a one percent degradation per GPU, and at 32 GPUs, the overall scale factor is 70 percent.

These results demonstrate significantly improved scalability compared to the legacy alternative of scaling the number of GPUs using MPI to communicate between multiple nodes. When testing a multi-node model, GPU scalability is reduced to 50 percent or less. The following charts show two real-world examples of these two use cases (see graphs on attachment). More testing results can be found here.

“This testing shows the enormous value of using GigaIO’s SuperNODE to get all the benefits of composability, without any of the hassles,” said Alan Benjamin, CEO & President, GigaIO. AMD and GigaIO engineered the entire hardware and software stack of the SuperNODE up to and including the TensorFlow and PyTorch libraries so that applications “just run” without any software changes. “Customers can scale GPU performance without the overhead of multiple servers using our FabreX software, and get unprecedented flexibility. When a large job needs results fast, 32 GPUs can be deployed on a single compute node simply and efficiently, with leadership low latency and power usage. Those same accelerators can then be easily and quickly reallocated to other servers, thus optimizing their utilization. Let the job define your system, and not the other way around,” added Benjamin.

GigaIO

Integration and support service launched to help organisations adopy cloud supercomputing

Rob Roe — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 11:42:04 +0000

Credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

To meet the rapid increase in demand for computer processing power of high-end research, Red Oak Consulting, a specialist in high performance computer (HPC) systems, has launched a three-tiered, fully managed service solution to help organisations move their research systems into the realm of cloud-based supercomputers.

This, the company says, is applicable for organisations working across a whole host of sectors, where quite literally petabytes of data are required to be processed in milliseconds, where normal computers simply couldn’t cope, and the only solution is a high performance, or supercomputer. As this moves increasingly towards cloud-based solutions, the level of support, technological knowledge and expertise moves into a whole new territory.

Designed to deliver complete peace of mind to any organisation requiring the seamless functionality of HPC throughout transition and through everything from incident logging, cost and usage analysis, Red Oak Managed Services (ROMS) is tailored to a business’s requirements, especially when critical issues require speed, and deep-level expertise.

Owen Thomas, senior partner and co-founder of Red Oak Consulting, said: “UK universities and research institutions have built an enviable reputation over the years of underpinning and feeding into industries such as energy, nuclear, defence and even genomics. It’s where everything starts, and where ideas are turned into economic reality.

“Therefore, we are in no doubt as to the complexities of our customers’ environments, and HPC requires a high and often intricate level of understanding and support that is not always available in house or on-premises.

“Likewise, we understand the transition from on-premises to the cloud can be met with trepidation for many. But that is precisely why we exist; to manage the change, and to support the onward journey with agility and flexibility so HPC users can concentrate on their work without stress and undue downtime.”

Speaking of his experience with ROMS, Nigel Cowler, digital cloud platform owner for Lloyds Register, said: “I highly recommend ROMS for their exceptional HPC (High-Performance Computing) support services. From the moment we engaged with them, their professionalism and expertise were evident.

“They demonstrated a deep understanding of our needs and provided tailored solutions that perfectly aligned with our requirements. Their level of engagement and commitment to delivering high-quality results matched our expectations.

“Red Oak Consultancy has proven to be a reliable and knowledgeable partner in the realm of HPC, and we continue to benefit from their valuable support.”

Within the bespoke packages – Silver, Gold and Platinum Plus – ROMS offers three distinct areas of support, namely HPC system admin support, business-oriented reporting and cost & usage analysis. All of which are designed to help organisations running multiple HPC workflows greater knowledge of their systems, and a guarantee to get the best productivity, flexibility and value for users and the business.

Support is provided via a team of highly skilled HPC specialists with backgrounds in both academia and the corporate sector as users, engineers, solutions architects or software support agents.

News releases

Red Oak

Cloud Computing