GPT 3

Graphcore's Phil Brown on how IPUs are advancing machine intelligence



Weights & Biases

Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore’s Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs).

Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where they’re building high-performance machine learning applications for their Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), new processors specifically designed for AI compute.

Connect with Phil:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsbrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/phil_s_brown

0:00 Sneak peek, intro
1:44 From computational chemistry to Graphcore
5:16 The simulations behind weather prediction
10:54 Measuring improvement in weather prediction systems
15:35 How high performance computing and ML have different needs
19:00 The potential of sparse training
31:08 IPUs and computer architecture for machine learning
39:10 On performance improvements
44:43 The impacts of increasing computing capability
50:24 The ML chicken and egg problem
52:00 The challenges of converging at scale and bringing hardware to market

Links Discussed:
Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners (Evci et al., 2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11134
Graphcore MK2 Benchmarks: https://www.graphcore.ai/mk2-benchmarks

Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects:
http://wandb.me/gd-phil-brown

Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud

Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack​​

Check out our Gallery, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/gallery