Postal service sees efficiency gains with nationwide edge AI

The U.S. Postal Service often gets a bad rap for slow deliveries and budget overruns but lately has been embracing use of an edge artificial intelligence platform across 195 processing centers nationwide. The AI benefits include the ability to track a missing package in a couple of hours instead of several days under a previous routine, said Todd Schimmel, a manager of letter technology at USPS, in a statement. Training the USPS system for computer vision of packages was also vastly simplified with AI capabilities. What might have taken two weeks on a network of servers with 800 CPUs was reduced to 20 minutes on four Nvidia V100 Tensor Core GPUs in a single HPE Apollo 6500 server, Nvidia said. Now, each edge server processes 20 terabytes of images a day from more than 1,000 mail processing machines.