IBM Unveils New AI Software, Will Support Nvidia Volta

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a significant new release of its PowerAI deep learning software distribution on Power Systems that attacks the major challenges facing data scientists and developers by simplifying the development experience with tools and data preparation while also dramatically reducing the time required for AI system training from weeks to hours. Data scientists and developers use deep learning to develop applications ranging from computer vision for self-driving cars to real time fraud detection and credit risk analysis systems. These cognitive applications are much more compute resource hungry than traditional applications and can often overwhelm x86 systems. "IBM PowerAI on Power servers with GPU accelerators provide at least twice the performance of our x86 platform; everything is faster and easier: adding memory, setting up new servers and so on," said current PowerAI customer Ari Juntunen, CTO at Elinar Oy Ltd. "As a result, we can get new solutions to market quickly, protecting our edge over the competition. We think that the combination of IBM Power and PowerAI is the best platform for AI developers in the market today. For AI, speed is everything --nothing else comes close in our opinion."