IBM Research Cracks Code on Accelerating Key Machine Learning Algorithms

Deep learning is well known to be very amenable to GPU acceleration. Accelerating "traditional" machine learning methods like logistic regression, linear regression, and support vector machines with GPUs at scale, has, however, been challenging. Today I am very proud to share a major breakthrough that IBM Research has made in this critical area. A team out of our Zurich IBM Research lab beat a previous performance benchmark set for a machine learning workload by Google by 46 times. The research team trained a logistic regression classifier to predict clicks on advertisements using a Terabyte-scale data set that consists of online advertising click-thru data, containing 4.2 billion training examples and 1 million features.