An AI weather program running for a single second on a desktop can match the accuracy of traditional forecasts that take hours or days on powerful supercomputers, claim its creators. Weather forecasting has, since the 1950s, relied on physics-based models that extrapolate from observations made using satellites, balloons and weather stations. But these calculations, known as numerical weather prediction (NWP), are extremely intensive and rely on vast, expensive and energy-hungry supercomputers. Microsoft has a new quantum computer – but does it actually work? In recent years, researchers have tried to streamline this process by applying AI.

Prof Simon McIntosh-Smith, senior lecturer of high performance computing at the University of Bristol, said: "We're delighted to be chosen as the site to host the UK's first ever Artificial Intelligence Research Resource.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) selected HPE to build its next-generation supercomputer, Shaheen III, to deliver state-of-the-art supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for advancing research in fields such as food, water, energy and the environment. "Powered by AMD EPYC processors, Shaheen III will enable new discoveries that will have regional and global impacts across climate, clean energy and tectonic plate modeling, all made possible by the collaboration between KAUST scientists and HPE." Supercomputing capacity has become increasingly vital to global innovation, industry competitiveness and economic growth. From accelerating vaccine discovery to fight a pandemic, advancing clean energy systems to increase sustainability, to enabling new possibilities in AI, supercomputing is a core technology to solving the world's most challenging scientific and engineering problems. Shaheen III, set to be 20 times faster than KAUST's existing system, will be the most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East to address critical areas that have a societal and environmental impact. Built by HPE, the world's leading supercomputer provider, the new Shaheen III system will revolutionize KAUST's ability to process vast amounts of data at immense speed and scale, enabling its users to unlock discoveries that it could not have before, and realize new potentials for AI.

The most powerful supercomputers on the planet are used to perform all manner of complex operations. Increasingly, they are used to enable artificial intelligence for research that could one day impact billions of people. The world's fastest and most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) supercomputers are front and center at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) which runs from May 29 to June 2 in Hamburg, Germany. As part of the ISC event, Nvidia will provide insight about its latest HPC systems and the use cases they enable. "HPC plus AI is really the transformational tool of scientific computing," Dion Harris, lead technical product marketing manager for accelerated computing, said in a media briefing ahead of ISC.

The University of Florida recently turned on the eighth most powerful supercomputer in higher education and 22nd most powerful supercomputer in the world. And added 100 new AI-focused faculty to the already several hundred who are engaged in AI. It's a complete transformation of higher education, built on artificial intelligence as a core competency. Joseph Glover, Provost and Senior VP of Academic Affairs, told me recently on the TechFirst podcast. "The College of Business just made AI a required introductory course for their entering freshmen ... we believe that this is going to be a transformational initiative for the University of Florida. We think that this is where higher education is going to inevitably go."

It's been nearly two years since Tesla's first "Autonomy Day" event, at which CEO Elon Musk made numerous lofty predictions about the future of autonomous vehicles, including his infamous claim that the company would have "one million robotaxis on the road" by the end of 2020. This time, the event will be called "AI Day," and according to Musk, the "sole goal" is to persuade experts in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence to come work at Tesla. The company is known for its high rate of turnover, the latest being Jerome Guillen, a key executive who worked at Tesla for 10 years before recently stepping down. Attracting and retaining talent, especially top tier names, has proven to be a challenge for the company. The August 19th event is scheduled to start at 5PM PT / 8PM ET at Tesla's headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

One of the most powerful supercomputers in the world has been brought online in the US and will be asked to apply its considerable artificial intelligence to some of the most challenging projects out there, from astrophysics and climate, to clean energy technologies. The Perlmutter system, a Hewlett-Packard-built Cray EX supercomputer, was unveiled at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in California, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and is "the fastest on the planet", according to Nvidia, the chip manufacturer supplying much of its graphics hardware. "The Perlmutter supercomputer will help inspire the next generation of scientists and innovators, allowing the US and Department of Energy to remain a leader in using scientific computation to answer our greatest questions," said David Turk, the US Department of Energy's deputy secretary, at its launch. "As we continue to enhance and deploy computing platforms like this, our national labs will only be better positioned to develop solutions to today's toughest problems, from climate change to cyber security." The machine is powered by 6,159 Nvidia A100 Tensor Core graphics processing units, rendering it capable of delivering almost four exaflops or a quintillion floating-point operations per second, according to Nvidia.

It was last summer that I wrote about the Japanese computing giant'Fugaku' surpassing the American reigning champion Summit to become the fastest supercomputer in the World. Since then, Fugaku has solidified its position at the top spot -- according to the 56th edition of the TOP500 list published in Nov. 2020, its capacity has increased from 7,299,072 cores to 7,630,848 cores, posting a new world record 442 petaflops result on HPL. The most powerful supercomputer by RIKEN Center for Computational Science & Fujitsu has now been engaged in developing a real-world prediction tool. In a multinational collaborative endeavor, The International Research Institute of Disaster Science at Tohoku University, the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo, and Fujitsu Laboratories have come together to develop an AI model that will be able to predict tsunami flooding in coastal areas in near real-time. This could be a real handy tool for disaster management teams.

Most of you are probably familiar with the chip giants like Intel & AMD which command a bigger share of the computing processor market, but this entrant to the chip market in 1993 has solidified its reputation as a big name in the arena. Although most well-known for its graphical processing units (GPUs) -- GeForce is its primary & most popular product line, the company also provides system-on-a-chip units (SoCs) for the mobile computing and automotive market. Since 2014, Nvidia has begun to diversify its business from the niche markets of gaming, automotive electronics, and mobile devices. It is now venturing into the futuristic AI, along with providing parallel processing capabilities to researchers and scientists that allow them to efficiently run high-performance applications. Let's review of some these endeavors.

Researchers at NVIDIA and Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) model that determines whether a person showing up in the emergency room with COVID-19 symptoms will need supplemental oxygen hours or even days after an initial exam. The original AI model, named CORISK, was developed by scientist Dr. Quanzheng Li at Mass General Brigham. It combines medical imaging and health records to help clinicians more effectively manage hospitalizations at a time when many countries may start seeing the second wave of COVID-19 patients. To develop an AI model that doctors trust and that generalizes to as many hospitals as possible, NVIDIA and Mass General Brigham embarked on an initiative called EXAM (EMR CXR AI Model) the largest, most diverse federated learning initiative with 20 hospitals from around the world. In just two weeks, the global collaboration achieved a model with .94