LabGenius is engaged in AI-driven scientific research that could only have happened at this moment in time, and the cause couldn't be more important. Today, the company is focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced treatments for cancer and inflammatory diseases, but the principles can be applied far more widely. Using a combination of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and laboratory automation, the London-based biotech company is developing next-generation antibody therapeutics. The technologies and techniques involved have only recently reached the level of maturity needed for this ambitious undertaking. So, when IPU systems halved the compute time needed to run crucial AI model training, LabGenius' researchers realised that they had found a new and important tool in the race to innovate.

Sensoro - a worldwide leader in IoT and smart sensor technology - has chosen Graphcore systems to deliver the AI compute behind its latest environmental and safety monitoring systems. Graphcore IPUs will power a range of new Sensoro solutions, designed to help towns and cities become safer, greener places to live. AI solutions trained on data from smart sensors are emerging as an essential tool in the management of modern, urban environments as they transition to more sustainable forms of energy and transportation, while also dealing with the effects of climate change. Sensoro founder and CEO Tony Zhao said: "Graphcore's IPU systems provide an efficient and easy-to-use computing platform for our urban ESG solution, and solve the computing power bottleneck that we have faced for a long time. "The efficiency of Graphcore IPUs and Poplar's ease of use accelerates the development, optimization and deployment of multiple AI models, and gives us a computing foundation from which we can explore further innovative AI solutions.

Argonne National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary science and engineering research centre operated by the University of Chicago for the U.S. Department of Energy, has installed Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs) within its AI Testbed. The AI Testbed, operated by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), enables researchers to explore next-generation machine learning applications and workloads to advance the use of AI for science. Technologies selected for the testbed, such as Graphcore's IPUs, complement the facility's current and next-generation supercomputers to provide a state-of-the-art environment that supports pioneering research at the intersection of AI, big data, and high-performance computing (HPC). The systems in the ALCF AI Testbed are purpose-built for machine learning and data-centric workloads, making them well suited to address challenges involving the increasingly large amounts of data produced by supercomputers, light sources, and particle accelerators among other powerful research tools. In addition, the testbed allows researchers to explore novel workflows that combine AI methods with simulation and experimental science to accelerate the pace of discovery.

The 3D stacking of chips has been the subject of much speculation and innovation in the past decade, and we will be the first to admit that we have been mostly thinking about this as a way to cram more capacity into a given compute engine while at the same time getting components closer together along the Z axis and not just working in 2D anymore down on the X and Y axes. It was extremely interesting to see, then, the 3D wafer-on-wafer stacking that AI chip and system upstart GraphCore has been working on with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co had nothing to do making logic circuits more dense within a socket. This will happen over time, of course, but the 3D wafer stacking that GraphCore and TSMC have been exploring together and are delivering in the third generation "Bow" GraphCore IPU – the systems based on them bear the same nickname – is about creating a power delivery die that is bonded to the bottom of the existing compute die. The effect of this innovation is that GraphCore can get a more even power supply to the IPU, and therefore it can drop the voltage on its circuits and therefore increase the clock frequency while at the same time burning less power. The grief and cost of doing this power supply wafer and stacking the IPU wafer on top are outweighed by the performance and thermal benefits on the IPU, and therefore GraphCore and its customers come out ahead on the innovation curve.