by Angela Guess

A new press release out of Cray reports, “At the 2016 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Barcelona, Spain, global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the results of a deep learning collaboration between Cray, Microsoft, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) that expands the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. Running larger deep learning models is a path to new scientific possibilities, but conventional systems and architectures limit the problems that can be addressed, as models take too long to train. Cray worked with Microsoft and CSCS, a world-class scientific computing center, to leverage their decades of high performance computing expertise to profoundly scale the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (formerly CNTK) on a Cray® XC50™ supercomputer at CSCS nicknamed ‘Piz Daint’.”

The release continues, “By accelerating the training process, instead of waiting weeks or months for results, data scientists can obtain results within hours or even minutes. With the introduction of supercomputing architectures and technologies to deep learning frameworks, customers now have the ability to solve a whole new class of problems, such as moving from image recognition to video recognition, and from simple speech recognition to natural language processing with context. Deep learning problems share algorithmic similarities with applications traditionally run on a massively parallel supercomputer. By optimizing inter-node communication using the Cray® XC™ Aries network and a high performance MPI library, each training job can leverage significantly more compute resources – reducing the time required to train an individual model.”

Read more at Globe Newswire.

Photo credit: Cray